T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  There was a grand piano in one corner (Steinway, white) and across from it an electric version hooked up via a nest of wires to a pair of speakers that stood on either side of it. I had an impulse to lift the lid on the Steinway and try a key or two—and who in this world has ever entered a room with a piano and failed to go to it and tinkle out something, be it “Chopsticks” or the opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave”?—but I fought it down. The neighbors might have been behind an eight-foot wall but how could they fail to remark on the sound of a dead man playing the piano at six-thirty of a Sunday morning? No. No piano playing. Chrissie would be waking soon, the paper was still in the driveway and the croissants waiting. I had to go. Had to leave right this minute . . . but what was this on the walls, these rectangular forms giving back the soupy light? Photos. Framed photos.

  A glance showed me I’d been wrong in identifying Carey Fortunoff as the brooder in the group photograph. Here was his face replicated in half a dozen discrete scenarios, with and without his bandmates; with a pair of rockers even I recognized, famous men; with a sweet-faced woman sporting teased blond hair and holding an infant daughter, her hair teased too—and I realized, by process of elimination, that he was the one in the original photo partially obscured by a tombstone and staring straight into the camera. Not as dynamic maybe as the one I’d mistaken him for or as good-looking either, but solid in his own way. I imagined him as the composer, the arranger, the mad genius behind the band, because didn’t every band, if it was to succeed at any level, require a mad genius?

  I didn’t know. But suddenly I felt something, a presence, an aura, and I came back to myself. I needed to stop prying. I needed to leave. I needed croissants, coffee, my wife. And no, I had no interest in entering that bedroom down the hall or wherever it was. I turned to go, was actually on my way across the room and out the door, when my eye fell on the bookshelf, and if there’s an impulse every bit as compelling as to lift the lid on a piano and finger a few keys, it’s to inspect a bookcase, whether a friend’s or a stranger’s, just to get a sense of the titles some other person, someone other than you or your wife, would select and read. Without trying to sound overly dramatic, this was the moment where the fates intervened, because what drew my attention was a uniform set of leather-bound books, hand-numbered and dated. Journals. The journals of a third-tier musician who’d died alone in what sort of extremis I could only imagine—Carey Fortunoff’s journals. The one I picked at random was dated 1982, and I didn’t flip back the cover and leaf through it, because another impulse was at work in me, even stronger than the ones I’d already given way to.

  I never hesitated. Ignoring the warning voices rattling round my head, I tucked the volume under my arm and slipped out the way I’d come.

  —

  I tried to be inconspicuous on the street, just another man—citizen, neighbor, innocent—heading down to the bakery in the early morning with a favorite book, but in any case there was no one around to doubt or question me. The walls stood tall and mute. A soft breeze swayed in the treetops. On the main road, the one that arcs gracefully through the lower village, a pair of cars, pinked by the early sun, rolled silently to a halt at the four-way stop sign, then rolled on. I bought the newspaper from one of the machines ranged like staring eyes outside the bakery, folded the book inside it, and went on up the steps and into the shop, where the smells were sweet and comforting.

  Coffeed and croissanted, I took a table in back and made a show of studying the headlines before sliding the book out from between the Real Estate and Style sections. I won’t say my heart was hammering—it wasn’t—but I did feel the quickening pulse of an illicit thrill. I looked up. There were three other people in the place, aside from the girl behind the counter: two women and a man, each sitting separately, and each absorbed in laptop or phone. I didn’t recognize them—and if I didn’t recognize them, then they wouldn’t have recognized me. I opened the journal and spread it flat on the table.

  The first page simply stated the date in bold black numerals three inches high. Beneath it was the leering cartoon figure of what I at first took to be a devil—horns, goatee, cloven hooves—and I was put off. Here was the same old pubescent trope: devils and grinning skulls, phallic snakes, witch women and graves, a kind of wet dream of death you saw in one form or another on every band poster of the era. But then I saw my mistake—the figure was actually meant to be that of a satyr, as indicated by the definition of satyriasis written out in block letters at the bottom of the page: Excessive or abnormal sexual craving in the male. Which was at least more interesting. I turned the page.

  What followed, beginning with the first entry for January 1, the day after the band had performed for a New Year’s Eve party at a place called the Whisky, alternated between descriptions of random sexual encounters (groupies), drug use (cocaine, Percodan) and recording sessions for the group’s first album, which apparently was being released that May by Warner Brothers, one of the big companies of the time. It was the usual sort of thing, the rock and roll cliché interlarded with detailed descriptions of various sex acts and demeaning depictions of the females involved, forays into new pharmaceutical experiences, visits to the doctor for burns, contusions and sexually transmitted diseases, set lists, the names of cities, restaurants, venues. I have to admit I began to skip ahead. What was I looking for? Introspection. Connection. Some sort of insight into a life, this life, a life lived coevally with my own. And pain, of course—the sort of pain and hurt and trauma that defines and delimits any life on this earth.

  I wasn’t disappointed. In May, once the band went on tour, the entries began to shrink away to virtually nothing, a single line, the name of a city (Cincinnati, encore “Hammerhead” & “Corti-Zone,” vomit on shoes, whose?), and then in June the pages went blank altogether. What happened—and this was revealed in the first long entry for July, the longest entry in the journal thus far—was that Carey Fortunoff, mad genius of Metalavox or no, had quit the band in mid-tour, kicking out the windshield of the van they were traveling in after a dispute with the drummer over credit for a song he (the drummer) claimed he’d co-written.

  Carey was uncompromising. He had a temper. And no matter how his bandmates pleaded with him, or the drummer (Topper Hogg, another name to look up) prostrated himself, Carey walked away from the whole thing. Just crossed the road, stuck out his thumb and spent two deprived and miserable weeks flagging rides west, sleeping rough, haunting Dumpsters outside fast-food restaurants and listening to every sort of country western and pop atrocity his thumbed rides inflicted on him, till he finally made it back to L.A. And his wife. His wife, Pamela, mentioned now for the first time, as if she’d been supplied by a casting company, as if she’d carried no more weight in his life than one of the Cindys and Susies and Chantals he picked up after every gig, as he called it. (Lost 22 pounds by the time I got back to Pamela, my head splitting open like a big ripe cantaloupe. Why didn’t you call me? she said. And what’d I do? I just shrugged, because how you could you even begin to put it into words?)

  Imagine my surprise. But then, of course, I didn’t have access to the earlier volumes, which for all I knew might have portrayed an awkward first meeting, a tender courtship and a marriage as deep and committed and sweetly strong as the one Chrissie and I have been able to make together. So give him credit. If anyone’s at fault here, it’s me, for having entered his story at random, for hovering over it like some sort of vulture, for being a thief, an expropriator—and yet as I look back on it now, everything I did, even if it was questionable, even if it was ultimately futile, was for a reason. For the better, that is. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

  The next surprise was his daughter. Two lines after he mentioned the wife, in trotted the daughter. A three-year-old. Terri. And whether she was a prodigy or autistic, tall or short or fat or thin, dark or blond (and here something clicked: the pouf-haired toddler in the photo?), I couldn’t have said, n
ot yet, not without reading on. I looked up. My coffee cup was empty and the plate before me held nothing but crumbs, so I closed the book, slipped it back into the newspaper and went home to my wife.

  —

  That night I took Chrissie out to La Maison, the new restaurant in the village that was so popular you couldn’t get in the door unless you had connections, but, of course, I always had connections. I walked her the long way around, avoiding Carey Fortunoff’s street, making up some excuse about wanting to stop off at the ATM for cash, when, in fact, I had more than enough with me, not to mention half a dozen credit cards, all fully paid up. The maitre d’, who was fooling nobody with his simulated French accent, practically went down on his knees when we came through the door, and we were soon sitting at our favorite table on the patio, where we liked to watch the evening light mellow over the village and cling to the mountains beyond till everything was in shadow but for the highest peak. Our daughter, Patricia, was away for the summer on a fellowship in Florence, studying art restoration, and though we both missed her, it was nice to be free to come and go as we pleased, almost as if we were dating again. When the waiter poured out our first glass of wine, I took Chrissie’s hand and raised my glass to her.

  We were on our second glass, Chrissie as ebullient as ever, her voice rising and falling like birdsong as she gossiped about this neighbor or that and filled me in on the details of Mary Ellen Stovall’s marital tribulations, when she suddenly glanced up and said, “Oh, you remember that house? The one on Runyon?”

  “What house?” I said, though I knew perfectly well what she was talking about.

  “The one where the guy died? The musician?”

  This was my chance to come clean, to tell her about the leather-bound volume I’d secreted in the garage behind a shelf of old National Geographics, but I held back, and I still don’t know why. I shifted my eyes. Broke off a crust of bread and chased a dollop of tapenade across my plate.

  “Mary Ellen says there’s no way they can ever get the smell out of the house—it’s like that boat in the harbor, remember, where the seal climbed up and then fell through the skylight into the galley and couldn’t get out?” She gestured with her glass. “And rotted there, for what, weeks, wasn’t it? Or months. Maybe it was months.”

  “So what are they going to do?”

  She shrugged, her bracelets faintly chiming as she worked her fork delicately in the flaking white flesh of the halibut Provençal, which was her favorite thing on the menu. Mine too, actually, as neither of us eats much meat anymore. “I don’t know—but it’s got to be a teardown, don’t you think?”

  —

  There had been problems with Carey Fortunoff’s marriage almost from the start. Pamela was one of the hangers-on, one of the original groupies, when the band had first formed and was still rehearsing in somebody’s mother’s garage. She was nineteen years old, shining like a rocket blazing across the sky (Carey’s words, not mine), and she had musical ambitions of her own. She played guitar. Wrote her own songs. She’d been performing in a local coffeehouse since she was fourteen (this was in Torrance, from what I could gather, the town where Carey had been raised by a single mother with a drinking problem), and for a while she’d sat in with the band during rehearsals and they’d even covered one or two of her songs. But then she got pregnant. And Topper Hogg joined the band and felt they should go in a different direction. So she stayed home. And Carey, a self-confessed sex addict, went on the road.

  All this came out in the July entries, this and more—how she’d refused to have an abortion, how she swore she’d stick to him till the seas boiled and the flesh melted from her bones no matter what he threw at her, whether he gave her a dose of the clap (twice) or chlamydia (once) or whether he loved her or not. It came out because he was back with her now, living in a two-room apartment in Redondo Beach and trying both to shake off the uneasiness—fright—of having burned his bridges with Metalavox and forge on with new music for a solo album. He was feeling introspective. Or confused. Or both. At any rate, this was where the journal became something more than a compilation of trivia and deepened into something more—a life, that is. I was hooked. That night, after Chrissie had gone to bed, I went out to the garage and read it through to the end.

  For the first few weeks, they went to the beach nearly every day—to “kick back,” as he put it. There was the sun, the sand, there were the surfboards he and Pamela paddled out on the ocean while whoever they could grab hold of watched the little girl so she didn’t drown herself, the days lazy and long and memorialized by the potent aroma of suntan oil and the hiss of cold beer in the can. But Carey wasn’t much of a surfer and the waves were all taken in any case (prioritized, that is, by a clique of locals who resented outsiders and one another too), and by August he and his family were headed north, for the Russian River, where they were going to stay for the remainder of the summer with another couple—friends from high school, from what I could gather. Jim and Francie. Jim was a writer, Francie taught school. And they’d rented a “funky” cabin in the redwoods just three blocks from the river and a place called Ginger’s Rancho, where local bands played six nights a week and on Mondays there were poetry readings.

  It was an ongoing party, shared meals, a surfeit of beer and wine and drugs, swimming in the river, dancing in the club at night, yet what Pamela didn’t know—or Jim either—was that Carey was having sex with Francie every chance he could get. They’d make excuses, going out to the market while Jim was writing and Pamela babysitting, taking long walks, swimming, canoeing, berry picking, their eyes complicit and yet no one the wiser. Then came a sultry afternoon in mid-August when they all went down to Ginger’s in their shorts and swimsuits to sit in the bar there, at a table in the corner where the window was thrust open and they could gaze out on the river as it made its swift dense progress to the sea. Francie was wearing her two-piece—a leopard-skin pattern, gold and black like the sun spotting the floor of the jungle—and Carey, in a pair of cut-off jeans, leaned into the table to admire the pattern of moles in the cleft between her breasts. (Orion’s Belt, he liked to call it—privately, of course—and he was writing a song named after one of the three stars of the constellation, Alnilam, though how he expected to find a rhyme for it I couldn’t imagine.) Pamela was in a one-piece and a baggy T-shirt and was trying her best to keep the little girl—Terri—entertained. Jim was Jim, with hair that hung in his eyes, a chain-drinker and chain-smoker who seemed content to let the world roll on by.

  An hour passed. They took turns buying rounds for the table. There was music on the jukebox and time slowed in the way it does when simply drawing breath is all that matters. Even Terri seemed content, sprawled on the floor and playing with her Barbies. Then, at a signal, Carey got up to go to the men’s room and a moment later Francie went to the ladies’, making sure the coast was clear before pulling him in with her and locking the door. It was risky, it was mad, but that made it all the more intensely erotic, a hurried bottomless grinding up against the sink while the jukebox thumped through the wall and the shouts of children at play in the shallows ricocheted eerily round them in that echoing space. Francie came back to the table first, after having hastily dabbed at herself with a wad of paper towels, and if her smooth tanned abdomen showed a trace of Carey’s fluids shining there, no one noticed. A moment later Carey sauntered across the room, four fresh gin and tonics cradled against his chest. “What took you so long?” Pamela wanted to know. He set down the drinks, one at a time, shrugged. “There was a line like you wouldn’t believe.”

  And where was Terri? She was at the next table over, being entertained by an old woman in a bleached straw hat who must have been a retired elementary school teacher or a grandmother or something of the like because she took right to Terri as if she’d been waiting for her all her life. The two of them were playing word games, playing patty-cake, the woman had her on her lap. Pamela said it was cute. The drinks wen
t down. The conversation jumped and sparked, longtime friends spinning out jokes and routines and gossiping about every soul they knew in common who didn’t happen to be sitting at the table in that moment. And then, at some point, Pamela glanced up and saw that the old woman in the straw hat was gone. Along with Terri. The little girl. Her daughter.

  It took a minute for Carey to grasp the situation—and when he did, when he got up dazedly from his chair, the first stirrings of alarm beating in him, he went methodically through the place, jerking out chairs to look under the tables, going down on his hands and knees, startling people, Pamela right behind him and Jim and Francie right behind her. Then it was the restrooms, the kitchen, then out the door to where the river, cold and muscular, framed the shore. He saw a maze of bare limbs, people spread out on mats and blankets, huddled beneath beach umbrellas in bruised puddles of shade, radios going, kids shouting, dogs shaking themselves dry. But he didn’t see Terri. And now it began to build in him, the shock and fear and hate—hate of the old woman, of all these people, these oblivious people, and of Pamela too, for doing this to him, for giving him this daughter he loved in that moment more than anything in the world. He began shouting his daughter’s name, his voice high and tight, as if he were onstage howling into the microphone at the climax of one his concerts, and here were Pamela and Jim and Francie, their faces shrinking away from his like stones dropped down a well. “Terri!” he called. “Terri!”