He became aware of the music then, some syrupy love song seeping out of the speakers, and what was it? Rod Stewart. Rod Stewart at his worst, hyper-inflated love delivered in a whisper, as manufactured as a pair of shoes or a box of doughnuts, and here was this couple sucking the breath out of each other, and what was he doing here, what was he thinking? He was drunk, that was what it was. And he hadn’t had anything to eat, had he? Eating was important. Vital. He had to eat, had to put something on his stomach to absorb the alcohol—how else could he get behind the wheel? Drunk driving on top of everything else. He pictured it: the cuffs, the cell, his corner in the teachers’ lounge deserted and Ed Jacobsen, the principal, wondering where he was—not a phone call? Couldn’t he even have called?
The thought propelled him up off the stool, down the length of the bar past the stupefied sports fans and the clinging couple and the bartender with the haircut like Rob’s, You have a good night now, and out onto the street. He stood there a moment outside the door, patting down his pockets, wallet, keys, cell phone, taking stock. The air was dense and moist, fog working its way up the streets as if the streets were rivers and the fog a thing you could float on. He could smell the ocean, the rankness of it. He thought he’d go to the next place, get a burger and coffee, black coffee—wasn’t that how it was done? Wasn’t that taking the cliché full circle? That was how it had been in college after he’d gone out cruising the bars with his dormmates, lonely, aching, repressed, gaping at the girls as they took command of the dance floor and never knowing what to do about it. A burger. Black coffee.
He started down the street, everything vague before him, trying to think of where to go, of who would be open at this hour. Things glittered in the half-light, the pavement wet, trash strewn at the curbs. A single car eased down the street, headlights muted, taillights bleeding out into the night. Neon thickened and blurred. He made a left on the main street, heading toward a place he thought might be open still, a place he and Laurie sometimes went to after a late movie, focused now, or as focused as he could be considering the whiskey and the hammer beating inside him, reverberating still, when a woman’s voice cut through the night. She was cursing, her delivery harsh, guttural, as if the words were being torn from her, and then there was the wet clap of flesh on flesh and a man’s voice, cursing back at her—figures there, contending in the shadows.
He wanted to call out, wanted to defy them, bark at them, split them apart, get angry, get furious—there they were, just ahead of him, the woman lurching into the man, the man’s arms in dark rapid motion, their curses propulsive, shoes shuffling on the concrete in a metastasized dance—but he didn’t. There was a suspended moment when they felt him there and they switched it off, in league against him, and then he was past them, his footsteps echoing and the curses starting up behind him in a low seething growl of antipathy.
How he made it home he couldn’t say, but he remembered standing at the door of the car fumbling with his keys on a street so dark it might as well have been underground and feeling the cell buzz in his pocket. Or thinking he felt it. He kept it on vibrate because of teaching, because of class—the embarrassment factor—but half the time he never felt it there against his skin and wound up missing his calls. Which was why he had to check messages all the time . . . but it was buzzing and he had it in his hand and flipped it open, the only light on the street and a dim light at that. Rob. Rob calling.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Todd, hey, bro—you okay? I mean, I been calling for like three hours now and I’m worried about you, because I mean, it’s tough, I know, but it’s not like the end of the world or anything—”
“Rob,” he said, his voice ground down so that he barely recognized it himself. “Rob, can you hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.”
“Good. Because screw you. That’s my message: screw you.” And then he’d turned the phone off and thrust it deep in his pocket.
—
When he came in the door the house was silent. There was a lamp on in the hallway and the nightlight in the kitchen was on too, but Laurie, in her meticulous way, had turned off all the rest and gone to bed. Or so it seemed. He moved slowly, heavily, his breath coming hard and his feet working as if independent of him, far away, down there in the shadows where the baseboard ran the length of the hall and conjoined with the frame of the bedroom door. If she had a light on in there—if she was up, waiting for him, waiting for what came next—he would have seen it in the crack at the bottom of the door, the tile uneven there, treacherous even, shoddy workmanship like everything else in the place. Very slowly, he turned the handle and eased the door open, wincing at the metallic protest of the hinges that needed a shot of WD-40, definitely needed WD-40, and then he was in the room and looking down at the shadow of her where she lay in bed, on her side, her back to him. It took him a moment to see her there, his eyes adjusting to the dark and the stripes of pale trembling light the streetlamp outside the window forced through the shades, but very gradually she began to take on shape and presence. Laurie. His wife.
He saw the way she’d tucked her shoulder beneath her, saw the rise there, the declivity of her waist and the sharp definition of her upthrust hip. He’d always loved her hips. And her legs. The indentation of her knees. The way she walked as if carrying a very special prize for someone she hadn’t quite discovered yet. He was remembering the first time he’d ever seen her, a hot summer day with the sun arching overhead and her walking toward him with a guy from school he liked to hang out with on weekends, and he didn’t know a thing about her, didn’t know her name or where she came from or that they liked the same books and bands and movies or that her whole being would open up to his and his to hers as if they had the same key and the key fit just exactly right. What he saw was the sun behind her and the shape of her revealed in silhouette, all form and grace and the light like poured gold. What he saw was the sway of her hips against the fierce brightness of the sun and the shadow of her legs caught in the grip of a long diaphanous dress, her legs, sweet and firm and purposeful, coming toward him.
He remembered that. Held that vision. And then, as quietly as he could, he pulled back the covers and got into bed beside her.
(2011)
The Night of the Satellite
What we were arguing about that night—and it was late, very late, 3:10 a.m. by my watch—was something that had happened nearly twelve hours earlier. A small thing, really, but by this time it had grown out of all proportion and poisoned everything we said, as if we didn’t have enough problems as it was. Mallory was relentless. And I was feeling defensive and maybe more than a little paranoid. We were both drunk. Or if not drunk, at least loosened up by what we’d consumed at Chris Wright’s place in the wake of the incident and then at dinner after and the bar after that. I could smell the nighttime stink of the river. I looked up and watched the sky expand overhead and then shrink down to fit me like a safety helmet. A truck went blatting by on the interstate and then it was silent but for the mosquitoes singing their blood song while the rest of the insect world screeched either in protest or accord, I couldn’t tell which, thrumming and thrumming till the night felt as if it was going to burst open and leave us shattered in the grass.
“You asshole,” she snarled.
“You’re the asshole,” I said.
“I hate you.”
“Ditto,” I said. “Ditto and square it.”
—
The day had begun peaceably enough, a Saturday, the two of us curled up and sleeping late, the shades drawn and the air conditioner doing its job. If it weren’t for the dog we might have slept right on into the afternoon because we’d been up late the night before at a club called Gabe’s, where we’d danced, with the assistance of well rum and two little white pills Mallory’s friend Mona had given her, till our clothes were sweated through and the muscles of our calves—my calves anyway—felt as if they’d b
een surgically removed, hammered flat and sewed back in place. But the dog (Nome, a husky, one blue eye, one brown) kept laying the wedge of his head on my side of the bed and emitting a series of truncated violin noises because his bladder was bursting and it was high time for his morning run.
My eyes flashed open, and despite the dog’s needs and the first stirrings of a headache, I got up with a feeling that the world was a hospitable place. After using the toilet and splashing some water on my face, I found my shorts on the floor where I’d left them, unfurled the dog’s leash and took him out the door. The sun was high. The dog sniffed and evacuated. I led him down to the corner store, picked up a copy of the newspaper and two coffees to go, retraced my steps along the quiet sun-dappled street, mounted the stairs to the apartment and settled back into bed. Mallory was sitting up waiting for me, still in her nightgown but with her glasses on—boxy little black-framed things that might have been an example of the generic reading glasses you find in the drugstore but for the fact that they were ground to the optometrist’s specifications and she wore them as a kind of combative fashion statement. She stretched and smiled when I came through the door and murmured something that might have been “good morning,” though, as I say, the morning was all but gone. I handed her a coffee and the Life section of the newspaper. Time slowed. For the next hour there were no sounds but for the rustle of newsprint and the gentle soughing suck of hot liquid through a small plastic aperture. We might have dozed. It didn’t matter. It was summer. And we were on break.
The plan was to drive out to the farmhouse our friends Chris and Anneliese Wright were renting from the farmer himself and laze away the hours sipping wine and maybe playing croquet or taking a hike along the creek that cut a crimped line through the cornfields which rose in an otherwise unbroken mass as far as you could see. After that, we’d play it by ear. It was too much trouble to bother with making dinner—and too hot, up in the nineties and so humid the air was like a flak jacket—and if Chris and Anneliese didn’t have anything else in mind, I was thinking of persuading them to join us at the vegetarian place in town for the falafel plate, with shredded carrots, hummus, tabouleh and the like, and then maybe hit a movie or head back over to Gabe’s till the night melted away. Fine. Perfect. Exactly what you wanted from a midsummer’s day in the Midwest the week after the summer session had ended and you’d put away your books for the three-week respite before the fall semester started up.
We didn’t have jobs, not in any real sense—jobs were a myth, a rumor—and we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do. We got financial aid, of course, and accrued debt on our student loans. Our car, a hand-me-down from Mallory’s mother, needed tires and probably everything else into the bargain. We wrote papers, graded papers, got A’s and B’s in the courses we took and doled out A’s and B’s in the courses we taught. Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time.
At any rate, we made some sandwiches, put the dog in the car and drove through the leafy streets of town until the trees gave way and the countryside opened up around us, two bottles of marked-down shoppers’ special Australian zinfandel in a bag on the floor in back. The radio was playing (bluegrass, a taste we’d acquired since moving out here in the heart of the country) and we had the windows rolled down to enjoy the breeze we were generating as the car humped through the cornfields and over a series of gently rolling hills that made us feel as if we were floating. Nome was in the back seat, hanging his head out the window and striping the fender with airborne slaver. All was well. But then we turned onto the unmarked blacktop road that led out to Chris and Anneliese’s and saw the car there, a silver Toyota, engine running, stopped in our lane and facing in the wrong direction.
As we got closer we saw a woman—girl—coming toward us down the center of the road, her face flushed and her eyes wet with what might have been the effects of overwrought emotion or maybe hay fever, which was endemic here, and we saw a man—boy—then too, perched on the hood of the car, shouting abuse at her retreating back. The term “lovers’ quarrel” came into my head at the very moment the girl lifted her face and Mallory yelled, “Stop!”
“It’s a lovers’ quarrel,” I said, ever so slightly depressing the accelerator.
“Stop!” Mallory repeated, more insistently this time. The guy was watching us, something like an angry smirk on his face. The girl—she was no more than a hundred feet away now—raised her hand as if to flag us down and I eased up on the gas, thinking that maybe they were in trouble after all, something wrong with the car, the engine overheating, the fuel gauge on empty. It was hot. Grasshoppers flung themselves at the windshield like yellow hail. All you could smell was tar.
The car slowed to a halt and the girl bent to my window, letting her face hover there a moment against the green tide of corn. “You need help?” I asked, and those were tears in her eyes, absolutely, tears that swelled against her lids and dried in translucent streaks radiating out from her cheekbones.
“He’s such a jerk,” she said, sucking in her breath. “He’s, he’s”—another breath—“I hate him.”
Mallory leaned over me so the girl could see her face. “Is he your—?”
“He’s a jerk,” the girl repeated. She was younger than us, late teens, early twenties. She wore her blond hair in braids and she was dressed in a black tank top, cut-off jeans and pink Crocs. She threw a look at the guy, who was still perched on the hood of the car, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand and began to cry again.
“That’s right,” he shouted. “Cry. Go ahead. And then you can run back to your mommy and daddy like the little retard you are!” He was blond too, more of a rusty blond, and he had the makings of a reddish beard creeping up into his sideburns. He was wearing a Banksy T-shirt, the one with the rat in sunglasses on it, and it clung to him as if it had been painted on. You could see that he spent time at the gym. A lot of time.
“Get in the car,” Mallory said. “You can come with us—it’ll be all right.”
I turned to Mallory, blocking her view of the girl. “It’s between them,” I said, and at the same time, I don’t know why, I hit the child lock so the door wouldn’t open. “It’s none of our business.”
“None of our business?” she shot back at me. “She could be abused, or I don’t know, abducted, you ever think of that?” She strained to look around me to where the girl was still standing there on the blacktop as if she’d been fixed in place. “Did he hit you, is that it?”
Another sob, sucked back as quickly as it was released. “No. He’s just a jerk, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” he crowed, sliding down off the hood now, “you tell them all about it, because you’re little Miss Perfect, aren’t you? You want to see something? You, I’m talking to you, you in the car.” He raised one arm to show the long red striations there, evidence of what had passed between them. “You want her? You can have her.”
“Get in,” Mallory said.
Nome began to whine. The house was no more than half a mile up the road and probably he could smell Chris and Anneliese’s dog, a malamute named Boxer, and maybe the sheep the farmer kept behind the fence that enclosed the barn. The girl shook her head.
“Go ahead, bitch,” the guy called. He leaned back into the hood of the car and folded his arms across his chest as if he’d been at this awhile and was prepared to go on indefinitely.
“You don’t have to put up with that,” Mallory said, and her voice was honed and hard, the voice she used on me when she was in a mood, when I was talking too much or hadn’t got around to washing the dishes when it was my turn. “Come on, get in.”
“No,” the girl said, stepping back from the car now so that we got a full view of her. Her arms shone with sweat. There were beads of moisture dotting her upper lip. She was pretty, very pretty.
I eased
off the brake pedal and the car inched forward even as Mallory said, “Stop, Paul, what are you doing?” and I said, “She doesn’t want to,” and then, lamely, “It’s a lovers’ quarrel, can’t you see that?” Then we were moving up the channel the road cut through the greenest fields in the world, past the pissed-off guy with the scratched forearms and a hard harsh gloating look in his eyes, down into a dip and up the next undulating hill, Mallory furious, thumping at the locked door as if it were a set of drums and straining her neck to look back as the whole scene receded in the rearview mirror.
—
By the time we got to Chris and Anneliese’s, Mallory was in full crisis mode. The minute we pulled into the driveway I flicked off the child lock, but she just gave me a withering look, slammed out of the car and stalked up the steps of the front porch, shouting, “Anneliese, Chris, where are you?” I was out of the car by then, Nome shooting over the front seat to rocket past me even as Boxer came tearing around the corner of the house, a yellow Lab pup I’d never seen before at his heels. The dogs barked rhapsodically, then the screen door swung open and there were Chris and Anneliese, spritzers clutched in their hands. Chris was barefoot and shirtless, Anneliese dressed almost identically to the girl on the road, except that her top was blue, to match her eyes, and she was wearing open-toed flats to show off her feet. Before grad school she’d been a hosiery model for Lord & Taylor in Chicago and she never missed an opportunity to let you know it. As for the rest of her, she was attractive enough, I suppose, with streamlined limbs, kinky copper-colored hair and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen or imagined. My own teeth tended toward the yellowish, but then neither of my parents was a dentist and both of hers were.
Mallory didn’t say hello or how are you or thanks for inviting us, but just wheeled around in exasperation and pointed down the road. “I need a bicycle,” she said. “Can I borrow somebody’s bicycle?”
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 118
