He watched her smile retract, lips tightening like wire. “I’m seeing somebody,” she said.
He was desperate. He’d been in jail. He’d never even got to deliver his speech. “He doesn’t have to know.”
“I’m sorry,” she said firmly and then she got up from the table. “I’ll take care of the check,” she added in a softer voice, and touched his hand in parting. The smile flickered back. “Sleep tight.”
He staggered up the stairs to his second-floor room like an octogenarian, as drained as he’d ever been in his life. For a long while he fumbled with the card key, trying it forwards, backwards, upside down, till finally the light went mercifully green and he was inside. The room was like any other. Stucco walls, beige lampshades, plastic night tables with some sort of fake wood-grain pattern worked in beneath the surface. Industrial carpeting. Sheets and blankets stretched tight as drumskin over the bed by immigrant women who’d seen too much in their own place and time and now had to rake through the daily leavings of the class of people who had the wherewithal to couple here and gulp booze and do drugs and clip their nails over the sink. He didn’t want to think about the women’s children and the hopes they might have had for them, about the boy and the big man and a room just like this one in Chicago or Detroit or wherever the bad people, the very bad people, did what they were going to do.
He went to the window and looked out into a vast parking lot, a great dark sinkhole illuminated by the sad yellow light of the arc lamps rising hazily out of it. It took him a moment, his reflection caught there in the window, his jacket like a dead thing wrapped around him, to realize it was snowing. Or no, this was sleet, definitely sleet, the storm that had hit Buffalo finally caught up with him.
—
In the morning, he took the train back, and if he lifted his head from the newspaper when anyone came down the aisle, it was a reflex only. The rails thumped beneath him with a pulverizing regularity that seemed to work so deeply inside him it was as if he were being eviscerated with each thrust of the wheels. His breath fogged the window. He tried Tim McNeil’s novel again and again it put him to sleep. Back at home, Caroline seemed to find the whole business hilarious and he just couldn’t summon the strength to give her the hard truth of it. Still, she did warm to him when they went out to Eladio and blew the two-hundred-fifty-dollar honorarium on abalone flown in from California, Kobe beef and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Demi-Sec chilled to perfection. Two days later he learned from the newspaper that the boy’s name was Efraín Silva and that he’d wandered away from his mother at the Home Depot in Amherst and was now reunited with her, though there seemed to be some question regarding her legal status, which had only come to light because of her going to the police. As for the abductor, the big man in the pressed pants and checked jacket, he was still at large, and whether he was Russian or Croatian or Fijian for that matter, no one knew. No one knew his name either. All they knew was what he’d done to the boy and where he’d done it and they knew too that he’d do it again to some other boy in some other place.
If Riley felt a vague unease in the coming days, he chalked it up to the cold he seemed to have caught somewhere along the line. And when the next invitation came—from Kipper College of the Dunes in Kipper, Oregon, informing him that he was one of three finalists for the Evergreen Award in Creative Literature for his novel Magpie of the Farm—he didn’t show it to Caroline or anyone else. He just went in through the house to the fireplace, stacked up the kindling there, and used the creamy soft vellum to guide the flame of the match into the very heart of the fire.
(2012)
Birnam Wood
It rained all that September, a grim cold bleached-out rain that found the holes in the roof and painted the corners with a black creeping mold that felt greasy to the touch. Heat would have dried it up, or at least curtailed it, but there was no heat—or insulation either—because this was a summer rental, the price fixed for the season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and the season was over. Long over. Back in May, when Nora was at school out west and I’d sent her a steady stream of wheedling letters begging her to come back to me, I’d described the place as a cottage. But it wasn’t a cottage. It was a shack, a converted chicken coop from a time long gone, and the landlord collected his rent in summer, then drained the pipes and shut it down over the winter so that everything in it froze to the point where the mold died back and the mice, disillusioned, moved on to warmer precincts.
In the summer, we’d been outside most of the time, reading and lazing in the hammock till it got dark, after which we’d either listened to records or gone out to a club or to somebody’s house. We had a lot of friends—my friends, that is, people I’d grown up with—and we could just show up anytime, day or night, and get a party going. On weekends, I’d unfold the geological survey maps of Fahnestock or Harriman Park and we’d pick out a lake in the middle of nowhere and hike in to see what it looked like in the shimmering world of color and movement. Almost always we’d have it to ourselves, and we’d swim, sunbathe, pass a joint and a bota bag of sweet red wine and make love under the sun while the trees swayed in the breeze and the only sound was the sound of the birds. Nora didn’t have a tan line all summer. Neither did I.
But then it was September and it was raining and I had to go back to work. I was substitute-teaching at the time, a grinding chaotic thankless job, but I didn’t really have a choice—we needed money to stay alive, same as anybody else. Nora could have worked—she had her degree now and she could have substituted, could have done anything—but the idea didn’t appeal to her and so on the three or four days a week I was summoned to one school or another, she was at home, listening to the rain drool from the eaves and trickle into the pots we’d set out under the worst of the leaks. I sprang for a cheap TV to keep her company, and then an electric heater the size of a six-pack of beer that nonetheless managed to make the meter spin like a 45. But then, we weren’t paying utilities—the landlord was. I’d given him a lump sum at the end of May—for the season—and now we were getting our own back. One morning when I was at work, he used his key to let himself in and found Nora in bed, the blankets pulled up to her neck and the TV rattling away, and he’d backed out the door, embarrassed, without saying a word. The next day we got the eviction notice. The day after that, he cut off the electricity.
I was cooking by candlelight over the gas stove a few nights later (Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli, out of the can, with a side of iceberg lettuce cut in wedges), when Nora edged up beside me. We’d been drinking burgundy out of the gallon jug we kept under the sink as a way of distracting ourselves from the obvious. The house crepitated around us. It wasn’t raining, at least not right then, but there was a whole lot of dripping going on, dripping that had emerged as the defining soundtrack of our lives in the absence of music, and I couldn’t remember a time, not a single minute going all the way back to the day we first met, when there wasn’t a record on or at least the radio.
Her hair shone greasily in the candlelight. She’d twisted it into pigtails for convenience because the water heater, which ran not on gas but electricity, was defunct now, definitely defunct, and there was no way to take a shower unless we went over to a friend’s house—and that involved the hassle of actually getting in the car and going someplace when it was so much easier just to pile up the blankets on the bed, get stoned and watch the shadows creep over the beams that did such an admirable job of holding up the slanted portion of the roof. Nora gazed into the pot on the stove. “I can’t live like this,” she said.
“No,” I said, and I was in full agreement here, “neither can I.”
—
The first place we looked at was also a seasonal rental, but the seasons were reversed. It was another crumbling outbuilding in the same summer colony, but it had been tricked up with heat and insulation because the landlady—eighty, ninety maybe, with eyes like crushed glass and hair raked back so tightly you could make o
ut the purple-splotched ruin of her scalp beneath—saw the advantage of renting through the winter and spring to whoever was left behind when the summer people went back to the city. I didn’t begrudge her that. I didn’t begrudge her anything. I didn’t even know her. Nora had circled an ad in the Pennysaver, dialed the number, and now here she was, the old lady, waiting for us on the porch, out of the rain, and the minute we pulled into the driveway she began waving impatiently for us to jump out of the car, hurry up the steps and get the business over with.
There were two problems with the house, the first apparent to all three of us, the second only to Nora and me. That problem, hovering over us before we even walked in the door, was that we were looking for a deal because we didn’t have the kind of money to put down for a deposit or first and last months’ rent, just enough for now, for the current month—enough, we hoped, to get us out of the converted chicken coop and into someplace with heat and electricity till we could think what to do next. The old lady—Mrs. Fried—didn’t look as if she would let things slide. Just the opposite. She gazed up at us out of her fractured eyes with the expectation of one thing only: money.
But then there was the first problem, which obviated the need to dwell on the second. The place was too small, smaller even than the shack we were living in, and we saw that the minute we stepped through the door. There were two rooms, bedroom and living room/kitchen, and to the right of the door, in a little recess, a bathroom the size of the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai. We never got that far. We just stood there, the three of us, and gazed into the bedroom, which was off the narrow hall. The bedroom was too cramped for anything but the single bed squeezed into it. A second single, made up with an army blanket and sheets gone gray with use, was pushed up against the wall in the hallway so that you had no more than a foot’s leeway to get around it and into the front room. The old lady read our faces, read our minds—or thought she did—and gestured first at the bed in the hallway and then the one in the bedroom. “Ven you vant,” she said, shrugging, her delicate wheeze of a voice clinging to the hard consonants of her youth, “you come.”
If Nora found it funny, laughing so hard she couldn’t seem to catch her breath as we ducked back into the car, I didn’t. I was the one put in the awkward position here, I was the provider, and what was she? It was the sort of question you didn’t ask, because it stirred resentment, and resentment was what had brought us down the first time around. I put the car in gear and drove down the dark tree-choked tunnel of the street, turned right, then right again, and swung into the muddy drive where the shack stood awaiting us. Inside, it smelled like a tomb. I could see my breath, even after I’d flicked on all four burners of the stove. Not sixty seconds went by before Nora said something that set me off and I came right back at her—“We wouldn’t be in this fucking mess if you’d get up off your ass and find a job”—and when we went to bed, early, to save on candles, it was for the warmth and nothing else.
There was no call next morning, and I had mixed feelings about that. I dreaded those calls, but they meant money—and money was the beginning and end of everything there was, at least right then. When the phone did finally ring it was half-past twelve and it went off like a flash bomb in the dream I was having, a dream that made me so much happier than the life I jolted awake to I wanted it to go on forever. My eyes opened on the slanted ceiling and my first thought was that even the chickens must have hated staring up at it, the sameness of it, day after day, until you lost your head and your feathers and somebody dropped you into a frying pan. Nora was propped up beside me, reading. Rain rapped insistently at the roof. “Well,” she said. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
The cold pricked me everywhere, like acupuncture, and I clutched my jeans to my groin, fumbled with a sweatshirt and hobbled across the room to snatch up the phone. It was my best friend, Artie, whom I’d known since elementary school. He didn’t bother with a greeting. “You find a place yet?”
“Uh-uh, no.”
“Well, I might’ve found something for you—”
I glanced at Nora. She’d put down her book and she was watching me now, her eyes squinted to slits in the fierceness of her concentration. Who is it? she mouthed, but I ignored her.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I didn’t know if you’d be interested, because it’s not a real rental—it’s more like housesitting—and it’s only temporary, like from next week through the end of April. It’s a friend of my father’s. An old guy and his wife. They go to Florida every winter and they want somebody in the house—or the apartment, there’s an apartment in the basement, above ground, with windows and all—just so they don’t get anybody breaking in. I was there once when I was a kid. It’s nice. On a private lake. A place called Birnam Wood. You ever hear of it?”
“No,” I said.
“Would you be interested at all?”
“You got a phone number?”
—
I told Nora not to get too excited because chances were it wouldn’t work out. Either we wouldn’t want the place—there had to be something wrong with it, right?—or they, the old couple, wouldn’t want us, once they got a look at us. Still, I phoned right away and the old man answered on the first ring. I introduced myself, talking fast, too fast maybe, because it wasn’t till I dropped the name of Artie’s father that the voice on the other end came to life. “Yes, we are expecting your call,” the old man said, and he had some sort of accent too, hesitating over the w in “we,” as if afraid it would congeal on him, and in a sudden jolt of paranoia I wondered if he and Mrs. Fried were somehow in league—or worse, if he was Mrs. Fried, throwing her voice to catch me unawares. But no, the place was miles away, buried in the woods in the hind end of Croton, well beyond the old lady’s reach. He gave the address, then directions, but they were so elaborate I stopped listening midway through, thinking instead of what Artie had said: the place was on a lake. A private lake. I’d find it, no problem. How many private lakes could there be? I told the old man we’d like to come have a look—at his earliest convenience, that is.
“When”—the hesitation again—“would you like to come?”
“I don’t know—how about now? Now okay?”
There was a long pause, during which Nora flapped both hands at me as if to say Don’t sound too eager, and then the old man, in his slow deliberate way, said, “Yes, that will suit us.”
We were late getting there, very late, actually, one snaking blacktop road looking much like the next, the rain hammering down and Nora digging into me along the lines of You’re a real idiot, you know that? and Why in God’s name didn’t you write down the directions? For a while it looked like a lost cause, trees crowding the road, nobody and nothing around except for the odd mailbox and the watery flash of a picture window glimpsed through the vegetation, but finally, after backing in and out of driveways and retracing our path half a dozen times, we came to a long low stone wall with a gated entrance flanked by two stone pillars. The gate—wrought-iron coated in black enamel so slick it glowed—stood open. A brass plaque affixed to the pillar on the right read BIRNAM WOOD. I didn’t want to bicker but I couldn’t help pointing out that we’d passed by the place at least three times already and Nora should have kept her eyes open because I was the one driving and she was the one doing all the bitching, but she just ignored me because the gravel of the private lane was crunching under our tires now and there were lawns and tennis courts opening up around us. Then the first house rose up out of the trees on our left, a huge towering thing of stone and glass with a glistening black slate roof and too many gables to count, even as the lake began to emerge from the mist on the other side of the road.
“Wow, you think that’s it?” Nora’s voice was pitched so low she might have been talking to herself. “Artie did say it was a mansion, right?” I could feel her eyes on me. “Well, didn’t he?”
I didn’t answer. A mom
ent ago I’d been worked up, hating her, hating the broken-down car with its bald tires and rusted-out panels that was the only thing we could afford, hating the trees and the rain, hating nature and rich people and the private lakes you couldn’t find unless you were rich yourself, unless you had a helicopter, a whole fleet of them, and now suddenly a different mix of emotions was surging through me—surprise, yes, awe even, but a kind of desperation too. Even as the next house came into view on the right—ivy-covered brick with three wings, half a dozen chimneys and a whole fairway of lawn sweeping down to the lake and the two red rowboats pulled up on a perfect little crescent of beach—I knew I had to live here or die and that I’d do anything it took, right down to licking the old man’s shoes, to make that happen.
“What’s the number?” I said. “You see a number on that house?”
She didn’t. She’d lost her glasses—she was always losing her glasses—and in our rush to get out the door she hadn’t bothered with her contacts either. No matter. The road took us over a stone bridge and swept us directly into the driveway of the house we were looking for—number 14. We got out of the car, the rain slackening now, and just stared up at the place, a big rearing brown-timbered Tudor that sat right on the lake itself. Around the corner I could make out a gazebo and a little dock with a rowboat tethered to it, this one painted green. And swans. Swans on the lake.
Everything seemed to brighten suddenly, as if the sun were about to break through. “All right,” I said, “here goes,” and I took Nora by the hand and led her up the flagstone steps to the front door.
—
I introduced Nora as my wife, though that was a lie. Old people, that’s what they wanted to hear. If you were married, you were mature, reliable, exactly like them, because in their day men and women didn’t just live together—they made a commitment, they had children and went on cruises and built big houses on lakes and filled them with all the precious trinkets and manufactured artifacts they collected along the way. Mr. and Mrs. Kuenzli—Anton and Eva—were just like that. They met us at the door, two dwarfish old people who were almost identical, except that she was wearing a dress and had dyed her hair and he wasn’t and hadn’t. They gave us tea in a big room overlooking the lake and then escorted us around the house to show off their various collections—Mexican pottery, jade figurines, seascapes painted by a one-armed man they’d encountered in Manila. Every object had a story connected to it. They took turns filling in the details, no hurry at all. I knew what they were doing: checking us out, trying to get a read on us. I shrugged it off. If they were alarmed at the sight of us (this was in a time when people our age wore beads and serapes and cowboy boots and grew their hair long for the express purpose of sticking it to the bourgeoisie), they didn’t show it. Still, it was a good hour before we went downstairs to the basement, which was where we were going to live, after all. That is, if things worked out.
T.C. Boyle Stories II: The Collected Stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, Volume II Page 129
