If the River Was Whiskey: Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

I’d been saving one for her, a disease a doctor friend had told me about. “Onchocerciasis,” I said. “You know it?”

  There was a thrill in her voice. “Tell me.”

  “South America and Africa both. A fly bites you and lays its eggs in your bloodstream and when the eggs hatch, the larvae—these little white worms—migrate to your eyeballs, right underneath the membrane there, so you can see them wriggling around.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line.

  “Breda?”

  “That’s sick,” she said. “That’s really sick.”

  But I thought—? I trailed off. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Listen,” and the edge came back into her voice, “the reason I called is because I love you, I think I love you, and I want you to meet somebody.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I want you to meet Michael. Michael Maloney.”

  “Sure. Who’s he?”

  She hesitated, paused just a beat, as if she knew she was going too far. “My doctor,” she said.

  You have to work at love. You have to bend, make subtle adjustments, sacrifices—love is nothing without sacrifice. I went to Dr. Maloney. Why not? I’d eaten tofu, bantered about leprosy and bilharziasis as if I were immune, and made love in a bag. If it made Breda happy—if it eased the nagging fears that ate at her day and night—then it was worth it.

  The doctor’s office was in Scarsdale, in his home, a two-tone mock Tudor with a winding drive and oaks as old as my grandfather’s Chrysler. He was a young man—late thirties, I guessed—with a red beard, shaved head, and a pair of oversized spectacles in clear plastic frames. He took me right away—the very day I called—and met me at the door himself. “Breda’s told me about you,” he said, leading me into the floodlit vault of his office. He looked at me appraisingly a moment, murmuring “Yes, yes” into his beard, and then, with the aid of his nurses, Miss Archibald and Miss Slivovitz, put me through a battery of tests that would have embarrassed an astronaut.

  First, there were the measurements, including digital joints, maxilla, cranium, penis, and earlobe. Next the rectal exam, the EEG and urine sample. And then the tests. Stress tests, patch tests, reflex tests, lung-capacity tests (I blew up yellow balloons till they popped, then breathed into a machine the size of a Hammond organ), the X-rays, sperm count, and a closely printed, twenty-four-page questionnaire that included sections on dream analysis, genealogy, and logic and reasoning. He drew blood too, of course—to test vital-organ function and exposure to disease. “We’re testing for antibodies to over fifty diseases,” he said, eyes dodging behind the walls of his lenses. “You’d be surprised how many people have been infected without even knowing it.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. On the way out he took my arm and told me he’d have the results in a week.

  That week was the happiest of my life. I was with Breda every night, and over the weekend we drove up to Vermont to stay at a hygiene center her cousin had told her about. We dined by candlelight—on real food—and afterward we donned the Saran Wrap suits and made joyous, sanitary love. I wanted more, of course—the touch of skin on skin—but I was fulfilled and I was happy. Go slow, I told myself. All things in time. One night, as we lay entwined in the big white fortress of her bed, I stripped back the hood of the plastic suit and asked her if she’d ever trust me enough to make love in the way of the centuries, raw and unprotected. She twisted free of her own wrapping and looked away, giving me that matchless patrician profile. “Yes,” she said, her voice pitched low, “yes, of course. Once the results are in.”

  “Results?”

  She turned to me, her eyes searching mine. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”

  I had. Carried away, intense, passionate, brimming with love, I’d forgotten.

  “Silly you,” she murmured, tracing the line of my lips with a slim, plastic-clad finger. “Does the name Michael Maloney ring a bell?”

  And then the roof fell in.

  I called and there was no answer. I tried her at work and her secretary said she was out. I left messages. She never called back. It was as if we’d never known one another, as if I were a stranger, a door-to-door salesman, a beggar on the street.

  I took up a vigil in front of her house. For a solid week I sat in my parked car and watched the door with all the fanatic devotion of a pilgrim at a shrine. Nothing. She neither came nor went. I rang the phone off the hook, interrogated her friends, haunted the elevator, the hallway, and the reception room at her office. She’d disappeared.

  Finally, in desperation, I called her cousin in Larchmont. I’d met her once—she was a homely, droopy-sweatered, baleful-looking girl who represented everything gone wrong in the genes that had come to such glorious fruition in Breda—and barely knew what to say to her. I’d made up a speech, something about how my mother was dying in Phoenix, the business was on the rocks, I was drinking too much and dwelling on thoughts of suicide, destruction, and final judgment, and I had to talk to Breda just one more time before the end, and did she by any chance know where she was? As it turned out, I didn’t need the speech. Breda answered the phone.

  “Breda, it’s me,” I choked. “I’ve been going crazy looking for you.”

  Silence.

  “Breda, what’s wrong? Didn’t you get my messages?”

  Her voice was halting, distant. “I can’t see you anymore,” she said.

  “Can’t see me?” I was stunned, hurt, angry. “What do you mean?”

  “All those feet,” she said.

  “Feet?” It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the shoe business. “But I don’t deal with anybody’s feet—I work in an office. Like you. With air-conditioning and sealed windows. I haven’t touched a foot since I was sixteen.”

  “Athlete’s foot,” she said. “Psoriasis. Eczema. Jungle rot.”

  “What is it? The physical?” My voice cracked with outrage. “Did I flunk the damn physical? Is that it?”

  She wouldn’t answer me.

  A chill went through me. “What did he say? What did the son of a bitch say?”

  There was a distant ticking over the line, the pulse of time and space, the gentle sway of Bell Telephone’s hundred million miles of wire.

  “Listen,” I pleaded, “see me one more time, just once—that’s all I ask. We’ll talk it over. We could go on a picnic. In the park. We could spread a blanket and, and we could sit on opposite corners—”

  “Lyme disease,” she said.

  “Lyme disease?”

  “Spread by tick bite. They’re seething in the grass. You get Bell’s palsy, meningitis, the lining of your brain swells up like dough.”

  “Rockefeller Center then,” I said. “By the fountain.”

  Her voice was dead. “Pigeons,” she said. “They’re like flying rats.”

  “Helmut’s. We can meet at Helmut’s. Please. I love you.”

  “I’m sorry.

  “Breda, please listen to me. We were so close—”

  “Yes,” she said, “we were close,” and I thought of that first night in her apartment, the boy in the bubble and the Saran Wrap suit, thought of the whole dizzy spectacle of our romance till her voice came down like a hammer on the refrain, “but not that close.”

  H A R D S E L L

  SO MAYBE I come on a little strong.

  “Hey, babes,” I say to him (through his interpreter, of course, this guy with a face like a thousand fists), “the beard’s got to go. And that thing on your head too—I mean I can dig it and all; it’s kinda wild, actually—but if you want to play with the big boys, we’ll get you a toup.” I wait right there a minute to let the interpreter finish his jabbering, but there’s no change in the old bird’s face—I might just as well have been talking to my shoes. But what the hey, I figure, he’s paying me a hundred big ones up front, the least I can do is give it a try. “And this jihad shit, can it, will you? I mean that kinda thing might go down over here but on Santa Monica Boulevard, believe me, it�
��s strictly from hunger.”

  Then the Ayatollah looks at me, one blink of these lizard eyes he’s got, and he says something in this throat-cancer rasp—he’s tired or he needs an enema or something—and the interpreter stands, the fourteen guys against the wall with the Uzis stand, some character out the window starts yodeling the midday prayers, and I stand too. I can feel it, instinctively—I mean, I’m perceptive, you know that, Bob—that’s it for the first day. I mean, nothing. Zero. Zilch. And I go out of there shaking my head, all these clowns with the Uzis closing in on me like piranha, and I’m thinking how in christ does this guy expect to upgrade his image when half the country’s in their bathrobe morning, noon, and night?

  Okay. So I’m burned from jet lag anyway, and I figure I’ll write the day off, go back to the hotel, have a couple Tanqueray rocks, and catch some z’s. What a joke, huh? They don’t have Tanqueray, Bob. Or rocks either. They don’t have Beefeater’s or Gordon’s—they don’t have a bar, for christsake. Can you believe it—the whole damn country, the cradle of civilization, and it’s dry. All of a sudden I’m beginning to see the light—this guy really is a fanatic. So anyway I’m sitting at this table in the lobby drinking grape soda—yeah, grape soda, out of the can—and thinking I better get on the horn with Chuck back in Century City, I mean like I been here what—three hours?—and already the situation is going down the tubes, when I feel this like pressure on my shoulder.

  I turn around and who is it but the interpreter, you know, the guy with the face. He’s leaning on me with his elbow. Like I’m a lamppost or something, and he’s wearing this big shit-eating grin. He’s like a little Ayatollah, this guy—beard, bathrobe, slippers, hat, the works—and he’s so close I can smell the roots of his hair.

  “I don’t like the tone you took with the Imam,” he says in this accent right out of a Pepperidge Farm commercial, I mean like Martha’s Vineyard all the way, and then he slides into the chair across from me. “This is not John Travolta you’re addressing, my very sorry friend. This is the earthly representative of the Qā’im, who will one day come to us to reveal the secrets of the divinity, Allah be praised.” Then he lowers his voice, drops the smile, and gives me this killer look. “Show a little respect,” he says.

  You know me, Bob—I don’t take shit from anybody, I don’t care who it is, Lee Iacocca, Steve Garvey, Joan Rivers (all clients of ours, by the way), and especially not from some nimrod that looks like he just walked off the set of Lawrence of Arabia, right? So I take a long swallow of grape soda, Mr. Cool all the way, and then set the can down like it’s a loaded .44. “Don’t tell me,” I go, “—Harvard, right?”

  And the jerk actually smiles. “Class of ‘68.”

  “Listen, pal,” I start to say, but he interrupts me.

  “The name is Hojatolislam.”

  Hey, you know me, I’m good with names—have to be in this business. But Hojatolislam? You got to be kidding. I mean I don’t even attempt it. “Okay,” I say, “I can appreciate where you’re coming from, the guy’s a big deal over here, yeah, all right…but believe me, you take it anyplace else and your Ayatollah’s got about as positive a public image as the Son of Sam. That’s what you hired us for, right? Hey, I don’t care what people think of the man, to me, I’m an agnostic personally, and this is just another guy with a negative public perception that wants to go upscale. And I’m going to talk to him. Straight up. All the cards on the table.”

  And then you know what he does, the chump? He says I’m crass. (Crass—and I’m wearing an Italian silk suit that’s worth more than this joker’ll make in six lifetimes and a pair of hand-stitched loafers that cost me…but I don’t even want to get into it.) Anway, I’m crass. I’m going to undermine the old fart’s credibility, as if he’s got any. It was so-and-so’s party that wanted me in—to make the Ayatollah look foolish—and he, Hojatolislam, is going to do everything in his power to see that it doesn’t happen.

  “Whoa,” I go, “don’t let’s mix politics up in this. I was hired to do a job here and I’m going to do it, whether you and the rest of the little ayatollahs like it or not.”

  Hoji kinda draws himself up and gives me this tight little kiss-my-ass smile. “Fine,” he says, “you can do what you want, but you know how much of what you said this morning came across? In my translation, that is?”

  Then it dawns on me: no wonder the Ayatollah looks like he’s in la-la land the whole time I’m talking to him—nothing’s getting through. “Let me guess,” I say.

  But he beats me to it, the son of a bitch. He leans forward on his elbows and makes this little circle with his thumb and index finger and then holds it up to his eye and peeks through it—real cute, huh?

  I don’t say a word. But I’m thinking okay, pal, you want to play hardball, we’ll play hardball.

  So it sounds like I’m in pretty deep, right? You’re probably thinking it’s tough enough to market this turkey to begin with, let alone having to deal with all these little ayatollahs and their pet gripes. But the way I see it, it’s no big problem. You got to ask yourself, what’s this guy got going for him? All right, he’s a fanatic. We admit it. Up front. But hell, you can capitalize on anything. Now the big thing about a fanatic is he’s sexy—look at Hitler, Stalin, with that head of hair of his, look at Fidel—and let’s face it, he’s got these kids, these so-called martyrs of the revolution, dying for him by the thousands. The guy’s got charisma to burn, no doubt about it. Clean him up and put him in front of the TV cameras, that’s the way I see it—and no, I’m not talking Merv Griffin and that sort of thing; I mean I can’t feature him up there in a luau shirt with a couple of gold chains or anything like that—but he could show some chest hair, for christsake. I mean he’s old, but hell, he’s a pretty sexy guy in his way. A power trip like that, all those kids dying in the swamps, giving the Iraqis hell, that’s a very sexy thing. In a weird way, I mean. Like it’s a real turn-on. Classic. But my idea is maybe get him a gig with GTE or somebody. You know, coach up his English like with that French guy they had on selling perfume a couple years back, real charming, sweet-guy kinda thing, right? No, selling the man is the least of my worries. But if I can’t talk to him, I’m cooked.

  So I go straight to my room and get Chuck on the horn. “Chuck,” I tell him, “they’re killing me over here. Send me an interpreter on the next plane, will you? Somebody that’s on our side.”

  Next morning, there’s a knock on my door. It’s this guy about five feet tall and five feet wide, with this little goatee and kinky hair all plastered down on his head. His name’s Parviz. Yesterday he’s selling rugs on La Brea, today he’s in Tehran. Fine. No problem. Only thing is he’s got this accent like Akim Tamiroff, I mean I can barely understand him myself, he’s nodding off to sleep on me, and I’ve got an appointment with the big guy at one. There’s no time for formalities, and plus the guy doesn’t know from shit about PR anyway, so I sit him down and wire him up with about sixty cups of crank and then we’re out the door.

  “Okay, Parviz,” I say, “let’s run with it.”

  Of course, we don’t even get in the door at the Ayatollah’s place and these creeps with the Uzis have Parviz up against the wall, feeling him up and jabbering away at him in this totally weird language of theirs—sounds like a tape loop of somebody clearing their throat. I mean, they feel me up too, but poor Parviz, they strip him down to his underwear—this skinny-strap T-shirt with his big pregnant gut hanging out and these boxer shorts with little blue parrots on them—and. the guy’s awake now, believe me. Awake, and sweating like a pig. So anyway, they usher us into this room—different room, different house than yesterday, by the way—and there he is, the Ayatollah, propped up on about a hundred pillows and giving us his lizard-on-a-rock look. Hoji’s there too, of course, along with all the other Ayatollah clones with their raggedy beards and pillbox hats.

  Soon as Hoji gets a load of Parviz though, he can see what’s coming and he throws some kind of fit, teeth flashing in his
beard, his face bruised up like a bag of bad plums, pissing and moaning and pointing at me and Parviz like we just got done raping his mother or something. But hey, I’ve taken some meetings in my time and if I can’t handle it, Bob, I mean who can? So I just kinda brush right by Hoji, a big closer’s smile on my face, and shake the old bird’s hand, and I mean nobody shakes his hand—nobody’s laid skin on him in maybe ten years, at least since the revolution, anyway. But I figure the guy used to live in Paris, right? He’s gotta have a nose for a good bottle of wine, a plate of crayfish, Havana cigars, the track, he’s probably dying for somebody to press some skin and shoot the bull about life in the civilized world. So I shake his hand and the room tenses up, but at least it shuts up Hoji for a minute and I see my opening. “Parviz,” I yell over my shoulder, “tell him that I said we both got the same goal, which is positive name/face recognition worldwide. I mean billboards on Sunset, the works, and if he listens to me and cleans up his act a little, I’m ninety-nine percent sure we’re going home.”

  Well, Parviz starts in and right away Hoji cuts him off with this high-octane rap, but the Ayatollah flicks his eyes and it’s like the guy just had the tongue ripped out of his head, I mean incredible, bang, that’s it. Hoji ducks his head and he’s gone. And me, I’m smiling like Mr. Cool. Parviz goes ahead and finishes and the old bird clears his throat and croaks something back.

  I’m not even looking at Parviz, just holding the Ayatollah’s eyes—by the way, I swear he dyes his eyebrows—and I go, “What’d he say?”

  And Parviz tells me. Twice. Thing is, I can’t understand a word he says, but the hell with it, I figure, be positive, right? “Okay,” I say, seeing as how we’re finally getting down to brass tacks, “about the beard. Tell him beards went out with Jim Morrison—and the bathrobe business is kinda kinky, and we can play to that if he wants, but wouldn’t he feel more comfortable in a nice Italian knit?”

  The big guy says nothing, but I can see this kinda glimmer in his eyes and I know he’s digging it, I mean I can feel it, and I figure we’ll worry about the grooming later and I cut right to the heart of it and lay my big idea on him, the idea that’s going to launch the whole campaign.