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

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  They did. I made sure they did. The minute we walked down the stairs I was hooked—and I could see that Nora was too. Here was a huge room—low-ceilinged, but the size of a basketball court—with a kitchen off to the left and next to it a bedroom with curtains, framed pictures on the walls and twin beds separated by matching night tables fitted out with ashtrays and reading lamps, just like the room every TV couple slept in, chastely and separately, so as not to confront the American family with the disturbing notion that people actually engaged in sexual relations. Nora gave me a furtive glance. “Ven you vant, you come,” she said under her breath, and we both broke up.

  Then it was back out into the main room and the real kicker, the deal-sealer, the sine qua non—a regulation-size slate-topped pool table. A pool table! All this—leather armchairs, Persian carpets, gleaming linoleum, heat, twin beds, the lake, the rowboat, swans—and a pool table too? It was too much. Whatever the old man was asking for rent, because this wasn’t strictly housesitting and we were willing to make a token monthly payment, I was ready to double. Triple. Anything he wanted. I squeezed Nora’s hand. She beamed up at me as the old couple looked on, smiling, moved now by the sight of us there in the depths of that house that had no doubt harbored children at one time, grandchildren even.

  I felt a vast calm settle over me. “We’ll take it,” I said.

  —

  At the end of the first week, after checking on us six or seven times a day (or spying on us, as Nora insisted, Mrs. Kuenzli fretting over how we were getting along—Fine, thanks—and even one night creaking down the stairs with a pot of homemade chicken-spaetzle soup), the old couple climbed into a limousine and went off to the airport, leaving us in possession. The main house was sealed off, of course, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about was getting out of the shack. What I cared about was Nora. Making her happy. Making myself happy—and everybody else too. Within days of the Kuenzlis’ departure, my friends began showing up unannounced for the purpose of shooting 8-ball and cranking up the volume on the Bang & Olufsen sound system the Kuenzlis had at some point so fortuitously installed, then maybe getting wrecked and taking the rowboat out on the glittering surface of the lake while the trees flamed and the swans bobbed in our wake. Even the weather cooperated. If September had been a loss, one of the coldest and rainiest on record, October tiptoed in on a streak of pure sunshine and temperatures that climbed into the seventies.

  I was shooting pool one Saturday afternoon with Artie and another friend, Richard, all three of us wired on Black Beauties and chain-drinking cheap beer, when Nora came in the door looking flushed. She had news. While we’d been frittering our time away—that was how she put it, “frittering,” but she was smiling now, hardly able to contain herself—she’d gone out on her own to interview for a job.

  I loved her in that moment, loved the way the color came into her face because she was addressing all three of us now, not just me, and that made her self-conscious no matter the news, which was good, very good, I could see that in an instant. “Well,” I said, “you get it?”

  The smile stalled, came back again. She nodded. “It’s not much,” she said, already retreating. She looked from me to Artie and Richard. “Minimum wage—but it’s six nights a week.”

  I’d set down my pool cue and was coming across the room to her, that big room with its buffed floors and the carpets thick enough for anything, when I noticed she was all dressed up, and not in business clothes but in the fringed boots and gauzy top she wore when we were going bar-hopping. “What is it,” I said, “that hostessing thing?”

  She nodded.

  “At Brennan’s?”

  Her smile was gone now. Her eyes—she was wearing her false lashes and pale blue eyeshadow—sank into mine. I was the one who’d told her about the job, which Richard had heard about from the bartender there. All you have to do is smile, I’d told her. All you have to do is say ‘Party of four?’ and let them follow you to the table. You can do that, can’t you? I hadn’t meant to be demeaning. Or maybe I had. She was strong-willed but I wanted to break her down, make her dependent, make her mine, but at the same time I wanted her to hold up her end, because we were a couple and that was what couples did. They worked. Both of them.

  I took her by the hand, tried to peck a kiss to her cheek, but she pulled away.

  “It means I’ll be gone nights.”

  I shrugged. I could feel Artie and Richard watching me. There was a record on the stereo—I remember this clearly—something drum-based, with a churning polyrhythmic beat that seemed to fester under my words. “At least it’s something,” I said.

  Artie lined up a shot. The balls clacked. Nothing dropped. “Hey, it’s great news,” he said, straightening up. “Congrats.”

  Nora gave him a look. “It’s only temporary,” she said.

  —

  We settled into a routine. The phone rang in the dark and I got up, answered it and found out what school I was going to because somebody who just couldn’t stand another day of it had called in sick—either that or hung himself—and I was back home by three-thirty or four, at which point she’d be drinking coffee and making herself scrambled eggs and toast. Then I’d drive her to work and either sit there at the bar for a couple (depending on how I was feeling about our financial situation), or go back home and shoot pool by myself, pitting Player A against Player B and trying not to play favorites, until she got off at ten and I went to pick her up. Sometimes we’d linger at the bar, but most nights—weeknights anyway—we’d go back home because I needed the sleep. We climbed into our separate beds, snug enough, warm and dry and feeling pampered—or if not pampered, at least secure—and when I switched off my reading lamp and turned to the wall the last image fading in my brain was of the steady bright nimbus of Nora’s light and her face shining there above her book.

  The weather held all that month, even as the leaves persisted and the lake rippled under the color of them. Whenever we could, we went out in the rowboat, and though we never acknowledged it I suppose we were both thinking the same thing—that we’d better take advantage of it while we could because each day of sun might be the last. I’d row and Nora would lie back against the seat in the stern, her eyes closed and her bare legs stretched out before her. What did I feel? Relaxed. As relaxed as I’ve ever felt in my life, before or since. There was something more to it too. I felt powerful, in command, the muscles of my arms flexing and releasing while Nora dozed at my feet and the rest of the world went still as held breath.

  It was a feeling that couldn’t last. And it didn’t. Less than a week into November there was frost on the windshield when I got up for school and the sun seemed to have vanished, replaced by a low cloud cover and winds out of the north. Finally, reluctantly, I pulled the rowboat ashore and turned it over for the winter. Two days later there was a rim of ice around the lake and the temperature went down into the teens overnight. But, as I say, the house was warm and well-insulated, with a furnace that could have heated six houses, and when we went to bed at night we couldn’t resist joking about the shack, what we’d be suffering if we were still there. “My feet,” Nora would say, “they’d freeze to the floor like when you touch the tip of your tongue to the ice-cube tray.” “Yeah,” I’d say, “yeah, but you wouldn’t even notice because by then we’d be dried up and frozen like those mummies they found in the Andes.” And she’d laugh, we’d both laugh, and listen to the whisper of the furnace as it clicked on and drove the warm air through the bedroom and into the big room beyond where the pool table stood draped in darkness.

  And then came the night when I dropped her off at Brennan’s and had my first drink and then another and didn’t feel like going home. It was as if some gauge inside me had been turned up high, all the way, top of the dial. I felt like that a lot back then, and maybe it was just an overload of testosterone, maybe that was all it was, but on this night I sat at the bar and kept on d
rinking. I knew the regulars, an older crowd that came in for dinner and gradually gave way to people like Nora and me, the music shifting from a soft whisper of jazz to the rock and roll we wanted to hear as the late diners gathered up their coats and gloves and doggie bags and headed out into the night. I’d been talking a lot of nothing to a guy in a sport coat who must have been in his thirties, a martini drinker, and when he got up and left a guy my own age slid onto the stool beside me. He asked me what was happening at the same time I asked him, then he ordered a drink—tequila and tonic, very West Coast, or hip, that is—and we started talking. His name was Steve, he had rust-red hair kinked out to his shoulders and he wore a thin headband of braided leather.

  What did we talk about? The usual, bands, drugs, what concerts we’d been to, but then we started in on books and I was pleased and surprised because most of the people I ran into in that time and place didn’t extend themselves much beyond the Sunday comics. We were debating some fine point of Slaughterhouse Five, testing each other’s bona fides—he could quote passages from memory, a talent I’ve never had—when Nora leaned in between us to brush a kiss to my lips, then straightened up and shook out her hair with a quick neat flip of her head. “My heels are killing me,” she said. “And this top—Jesus, I’m freezing.” She stole a look around, gave Steve a vacant smile, picked up my drink and downed it in a single gulp. Then she was gone, back to her post at the station by the door.

  Steve gave a low whistle. “Wow,” he said. “That your old lady?”

  I just shrugged, nonchalant, elevated in that instant above everybody in the place. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but something stirred in me whenever I looked up and saw the way the men watched her as she tapped across the floor in her heels, trailing husbands and wives and sometimes even kids behind her, but it wasn’t something good or admirable.

  “Man, I’d love to—” he began, and then caught himself. “You are one lucky dude.”

  Another shrug. My feelings were complicated. I’d been drinking. And what I said next was inexcusable, I know that, and I didn’t mean it, not in any literal sense, not in the real world of twin beds and Persian carpets and all the rest, but what I was trying to convey here was that I wasn’t tied down—old lady—wasn’t a husband, not yet anyway, and that all my potentialities were intact. “I don’t know,” I said, “she can be a real pain in the ass.” I took a sip of my drink, let out a long withering sigh. “Sometimes I think she’s more trouble than she’s worth, know what I mean?”

  That was all I said, or some variant of it, and then there was another drink and the conversation went deeper and I guess somehow Steve must have got the impression that we weren’t really all that committed, that living together was an experiment gone sour, that we were both—she and I—on the brink of something else. There was an exchange of phone numbers and addresses (Birnam Wood? Cool. I used to swim in the lake there when I was a kid) and then he was gone and the crowd at the bar began to thin. The minute he left I forgot him. Next thing I knew, Nora was there, dressed in her long coat and her knit hat and gloves, perched high on the platform of her heels.

  “You’ve been drinking,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  She gave me a tired smile. “Have fun?”

  “Yeah.” I smiled back.

  “Did you know it’s snowing out?”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” And then a beat. “You want me to drive?”

  —

  It was a long way home, twenty, twenty-five minutes under the best of conditions, but with the snow and the worn tires and the fact that Nora didn’t see too well at night, it must have taken us twice as long as that. We were the only ones on the road. The snow swept at the headlights and erased everything out in front of us. I tried not to be critical but every time we went around a curve the car sailed out of control and I suppose I got vocal about it because at one point she pulled over, her lips drawn tight and her eyes furious in the sick yellow glare of the dashboard. “You want to drive?” she said. “Go ahead, be my guest.”

  When we got home (finally, miraculously), the phone was ringing. I could hear it from outside the door, making its demands. It took me a minute, pinning a glove under one arm and struggling to work the key in the lock as the snow sifted down and Nora stamped impatiently. “Hurry up, I have to pee,” she said between clenched teeth. Then we were in, the phone ringing still—it must have been the sixth or seventh ring—and I flicked on the lights while Nora made a dash for the bathroom and I crossed the room to answer it.

  “Hello?” I gasped, out of breath and thinking it must be Artie, because who else would be calling at that hour?

  “Hey, what’s happening,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “This Keith?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Who’s this?”

  “Steve.”

  “Steve?”

  “From the bar, you know. Like earlier? Brennan’s?” I heard Nora flush the toilet. The cover was off the pool table because I’d left in the middle of the climactic match between Player A and Player B, all the angles still in play. I listened to the water rattle in the pipes. And then Steve’s voice, low, confidential, “Hey, I was just wondering. Is Nora there?”

  The bathroom door clicked open. There was a buzzing in my skull. Everything was wrong. “No,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis though there was no one there to see it, “she’s not in.”

  “When’ll she be back?”

  I said nothing. I watched her swing open the bathroom door, saw her face there, the pristine towels on the rack and the copper-and-gold wallpaper Mrs. Kuenzli must have gone to some special store to pick out because she wanted the best, only the best. The voice on the other end of the line was saying something else, insinuating, whispering in my ear like a disease, and so I bent down to where the phone was plugged into the wall and pulled it out of the socket.

  “Who was that?” Nora asked.

  “Nobody,” I said. “Wrong number.”

  She gave me a doubtful look. “You were on the line long enough.”

  I wanted to do something right for a change, wanted to take hold of her and press her to me, confess, tell her I loved her, but I didn’t. I just said, “You feel like a game of pool? I’ll spot you two balls—”

  “You play,” she said. “I’m beat. I think I’ll get ready for bed and read for a while.” She paused at the bedroom door to give me a sweet tired smile. “You’ve got to admit, Player B’s a lot better than I am anyway.”

  No argument there. I turned on the light over the table, cued up a record and took up the game where I’d left off. I was deep into my third game, on a real roll on behalf of Player A, the balls dropping as if I didn’t even have to use the stick, as if I were willing them in, when suddenly there was a knock at the door. Two thumps. A pause. And then two thumps more.

  I was just laying down the stick, any number of scenarios going through my head—it was a stranded motorist, the guy who drove the snowplow come to complain about the tail end of the car sticking out into the street, Artie braving the elements for a nightcap—when Nora came out of the bedroom, looking puzzled. She was in her pajamas, the kind kids wear, with a drawstring round the waist and a fold-down collar. Pink. With a flight of bluebirds running up and down her limbs and flapping across her chest. Her feet were bare. “Who’s that?” she asked. “Artie?”

  I didn’t know what was coming, couldn’t have guessed. I was in my own house, shooting pool and listening to music while the snow fell outside and the furnace hummed and my girlfriend stood there in her pajamas. “Must be,” I said, even as the knock came again and a voice, muffled by the door, called out, “Keith? Nora? Knock-knock. Anybody home?”

  I opened the door on Steve, his hair matted now and wet with snow. He was holding a bottle of tequila by the neck and raised it in offering as he stamped in through the door. “Hey,”
he said, handing me the bottle, “cool place.” He shrugged out of his jacket, dropping it right there on the floor. “Anybody down for a little action? Nora, how about you? A shot? Want to do a shot?”

  She looked at him, bewildered—or maybe it was just that she wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to squint to take him in. I just stood there, the bottle like a brick in my hand—or no, a cement block, a weight, avoirdupois, dragging me down.

  Steve never hesitated. He crossed the room to her, digging in his pocket for something, grinning and glassy-eyed. “Here,” he said, producing an envelope. “After I saw you tonight? You’re so beautiful. I don’t even know if you know how beautiful—and sexy. You’re really sexy.” He handed her the envelope, but she wasn’t looking at the envelope, she was looking at me. “I wrote you a poem,” he said. “Go ahead. Read it.”