Budding Prospects: A Pastoral (Contemporary American Fiction)

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Gesh gave me a sidelong glance. I tried to maintain my equanimity.

  “What do you think?” Phil said.

  Think? The thing was monstrous, anarchic, a mockery of proportion and grace of line. It looked like a heap of crushed and rusted French horns and tubas, it looked like a dismantled tank in the Sinai, it looked like the Watts Towers compressed by an Olympian fist. I walked round it, Phil at my side. Twenty feet high, wide around as my bedroom floor, it was monumental, toothy, jagged, unsteady, a maze of gears, bolts, hammered planes and swooping arcs. “Nice,” I said.

  Gesh’s hands were sunk deep in his pockets. He was grinning, fighting down a laugh, his face animated for the first time in days.

  Phil took my arm and backed off a pace or two, maneuvering for a better perspective. “I was thinking of calling it Agrarian Rhapsody“ he said, “but now I’m not so sure. What do you think of Burned?”

  If my co-workers had motivational problems during those declining weeks at the summer camp, I had my bouts of self-doubt and despondency, too. I felt useless, I felt as if I’d been sold a bill of goods, deceived, I felt like Willie Loman at the end of the road. But just when my spirit had shrunk to a hard black knot, the fire delivered me up to Petra and I felt my priorities shift like tectonic plates after a seismic storm. I’d been standing on one side of the rift, and then as the gulf widened I’d leapt to the other. Gesh ate himself up, Phil sought solace in art, I was in love.

  The others didn’t like it, not a bit. By introducing Petra to our inner circle, I’d compromised the project, weakened our position irretrievably. First I’d screwed up with Savoy, and now I’d willfully violated our vow of secrecy and my promise to remain on the property as long as Jerpbak roved the streets and the plants grew straight and tall. Phil looked the other way, Gesh muttered and swore, Vogelsang—had he known—would have mounted the pedestal of righteousness and denounced me for a turncoat and a fool, but nearly every afternoon during that three-week period between the fire and the rains, I cranked up the Toyota and drove into Willits. I couldn’t help myself. Didn’t want to. The summer camp was moribund; this was newborn.

  I would saunter into her shop at four each afternoon—horny as a tomcat, aching, throbbing, my eyes and fingertips, my tongue, lips, and nostrils swollen with lust—and feign indifference as she chatted with a customer or watch transfixed as she sat at her wheel, shaping clay beneath the pyramid of her long tapering fingers. The shop closed at five. I would have been up since seven, tending the plants for the first hour or two, then killing time with walks, cards, trashy paperbacks, the ritual of meals, the one-o’clock siesta, all the while palpitating for the hour of my liberation like a dog awaiting the scrape of his master’s heel on the doorstep. If there were no customers, I’d walk straight in, soothed by the music of the bell, the shadows, the cool plants and glistening triumphant pots, the music of Boccherini, Pachelbel, Palestrina, find her in her smock before the glowing oven or bent over the wheel, and stick my tongue in her ear. Sometimes she was busy, and I would wait; other times we would wrestle on the floor, naked in the clay, and let the angels sing.

  I liked it best when there were customers in the shop. Then I could browse, anonymous, a customer among customers, pondering this object or that, my fingers tracing the persuasive, gently swelling convexity of a vase or cupping a smooth glazed bowl as if it were an object of erotic devotion. This was the season of the late-blooming tourist, the golden ones, retirees in Winnebagos and Sceni-Cruisers, smiling their wan beneficent smiles, dropping Mastercard slips and traveler’s checks like manna. I heard madrigals and watched her lips, I hummed along with motets and saw the pregnant look she gave me over the stooped white heads of couples who’d been married fifty years. The anticipation was delicious. I watched her, ogled her, coveted her in the way a child covets the foil-wrapped gifts beneath the Christmas tree—the breasts pushing at her smock, the long impossible fall of her legs, the even white teeth, and the flawless tender expanse of her lips as she beamed at some sunny old character’s blandishments. Five o’clock would come and I’d help her close up the shop, draw the shades, count out the receipts with trembling fingers, touching her, and then I’d take her upstairs and ravish her. Or rather, during that first week when my hands were still bandaged, she ravished me. Upstairs, on her bed, under the greedy voyeuristic gaze of her dwarves and elves and pinheads, she undressed me, button by button. Then she took off her smock.

  We would drink a bottle of wine, eat a lazy dinner—tofu salad or veggie delight from Sarah’s place or three-pound garbage burritos from the Mexican restaurant two doors down—go back to bed, smoke, drink, talk. We talked about our respective childhoods, childhood in general, about the relative virtues of growing up in Chicago and New York, about sculpture, movies, books, the tide of illiteracy rising steadily to undermine the country’s intellectual foundations. We talked politics, art, religion, talked blues and plainsong, considered the variety of life on the planet and the argument from design, wondered about life after death and dismissed reincarnation. I confessed that like most children of the Wonder-bread era I hadn’t believed in God past the age of awareness, but that lately I’d begun to feel the tug of the irrational. She told me she’d wanted to be an artist since her discovery of fingerpaints in kindergarten; I told her I’d always been fascinated with dirigibles. Lighter than air, I said, as if the phrase were magical.

  “Felix, listen,” she said. Her hand was on my arm. She gave me a look, lips drawn tight, eyes extruded, that reminded me of Michelangelo’s PietéaG. “When he left me like that—my husband, I mean—it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I felt like I had a disease or something—I felt like I was a disease.”

  “You know, I quit on my wife,” I said.

  She just looked at me.

  “It was a career thing. Or no, it was me, I was immature, hung up on role playing, you know?” I told her about Ronnie, how when we met she’d seemed so helpless, so utterly adrift—unable to eat in a restaurant by herself, incapable of locking a car door or paying the phone bill before they disconnected her—and how good it had made me feel to think that she needed me, that I was her champion, her foundation and support. I told her how all that had changed, how she’d grown up and abandoned the little-girl-in-search-of-a-daddy role like a dress that no longer fit her, how she’d suddenly taken an interest in local politics, Afghan hounds and assertiveness training, how she’d asked me for a quid pro quo—to support her through her M.B. A. program as she’d supported me through my abortive Ph.D.—and how I’d quit on her. When I finished, I glanced at Petra like a guilty child, like a thug, a criminal, a male supremacist and backward boor, and flashed her a tentative smile. She was holding an empty teacup. “You know something?” she said. I shrugged. “The way you smile—with your whole face, with your eyes—it’s like a certificate of trust.”

  One night, I don’t remember how—who but an insomniac can retrace the web of association of even his own thoughts, let alone recall the progress of a free-ranging dialogue—we got on the subject of babies. It was not a subject to which I readily warmed. Raised as an only child in a neighborhood where it was thought impolite to have more than two children, I’d never had to deal with either sibling rivalry or sibling bonding, had never been supplanted at my mother’s breast by a little gene-shuffler, had never cooed into half-formed faces or wiped up infantile secretions. I knew more of dogs, cats or even goldfish than I knew of children, and my experience of the last-mentioned had been exclusively negative. Children—babies—were loathsome to me, all open orifices and dribbling body fluids, they were the noose around the throat, an end to youth, an eternal responsibility, anathema. But on this night, this otherwise triumphant, golden, redolent night, babies was the subject.

  “I’m twenty-nine now,” Petra said, running a reflective finger around the edge of her wineglass.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’ll be thirty in two months.”

  I nodded, wondering
what this had to do with anything. I felt a twinge of panic. Was she making an oblique comment on our relationship? Was she too old for me? Was I too young for her? Had she been doomed by some genetic infirmity to collapse on the brink of her fourth decade?

  “You know,” she said after a moment, “I could never be serious about anybody—a man, I mean—who didn’t want children.” We were in bed. Her legs were wrapped around me. At the mention of this highly charged term with its suggestion of sex, love, tenderness, and affliction, of generations gone down and generations to come, with its messy implications and terrible responsibilities, my poor organ rose briefly with the inflammatory thought of the act involved, and then immediately collapsed under the weight of the rest.

  “The child is father of the man,” I said, apropos of nothing. “Speaking of Wordsworth, do you know what Whitman had to say about childhood?”

  She was resolute, unswervable. “I’m no religious nut,” she said. “Or one of these virginal types out of a Victorian novel who can’t relate to good clean healthy athletic sex—it’s nothing like that.” She sat up, arranged herself against the headboard in the lotus position and then reached out to the night table to refill our wineglasses. I watched her breasts move.

  “It’s just that when you look at it, no matter how much our generation has tried to postpone the issue of adulthood and all the responsibilities that go with it, you’ve got to grow up sometime and realize that having a family is just a part of life, maybe the biggest part.” She shoved her hair back, took a sip of wine and went on to talk about the life force, mayflies, the great chain of being and the nesting habits of birds. She was philosophical, and she was nude. Somehow, everything she said made perfect sense. “It’s nature,” she said. “I mean, all these nerve endings, the physical thing, you know …” She dropped her eyes. I took her breast in my hand like a sacred object. I knew. “It’s all there to ensure the survival of the species.”

  I was sitting up now, too, sitting close, my hands on her. “You sound like Charles Darwin.”

  “No, I mean you go through life in stages and at each stage everything changes. You’re a kid with a doll or bicycle and every day lasts six years, then you’re a teenager counting pubic hairs and waiting for the phone to ring.”

  “You too, huh?”

  She smiled, nodded, took a quick sip of Bardolino. I hunkered closer.

  “Then you’re twenty, twenty-five, and you want to have a good time—why get tied down? Hedonism, right? The Me Generation?”

  My hands were on her, and now hers were on me. There was something moving in me, and it wasn’t philosophy.

  “I’m all for it,” she said. “But I want something else, too. I want to feel complete—you know what I mean?”

  At this point I could only murmur. I was rising up on my haunches like a satyr, falling into her as into a warm bath.

  And then all of a sudden she was gone. Pushing herself up from the bed, swinging her legs out, padding across the floor to the gnome that sat on her dresser. “I loved being a kid,” she said, running a thoughtful finger across the gnome’s fallen forehead. “Loved it. My mother was a big woman and she would take me shopping or walking along the lakeshore and I would feel like I was in the grip of some god and that nothing could go wrong, that everything would last forever, like in a painting—like in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte … you know it?”

  I shook my head.

  Then she was crossing the room to the bookcase, everything in motion, and bending like one of Degas’s nudes to pluck up a book of reproductions of the French Impressionists. She handed me the book, open to Seurat’s idyll. I saw a day of milky sunshine, kids, dogs, sunbonnets, a warmth and radiance that never ends, no quitting allowed. Or even contemplated. Petra was watching me. “Come here,” I said, setting the book aside. She came, and then we sank back into the bed and I gave myself over to impulse and the tug of the life force.

  The following day I strolled into the shop at the usual hour and found her bargaining with an old road warrior over a four-hundred dollar stoneware table setting.

  “Four hundred,” she said.

  The old man was heavyset, pouchy and grizzled, in a new white T-shirt. His face was broad and sorrowful, collapsing on itself like a decaying jack-o’-lantern. “Three hundred,” he said.

  “Four hundred.”

  “Three-fifty.”

  “Four hundred.”

  “Three seventy-five.”

  Light, airy, elegant, Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite fluttered effortlessly through the speakers as I walked in, wondering at the coincidence: was she trying to tell me something? Petra flashed me a smile, I winked in surreptitious acknowledgment, then turned to examine a soup tureen as if I’d never before encountered so exquisite an object, as if I could barely restrain myself from having it wrapped immediately and whirling round to bid on the old man’s crockery.

  “Three-eighty,” he said, “and that’s my final price.”

  But Petra wasn’t there to answer. She’d swept across the room, locking her arm in mine and effectively blowing my cover as the disinterested and anonymous pottery-lover. “Felix,” she gasped, grinning till all her fine teeth showed, strangely animated, ebullient, ticking away like a kettle coming on to full boil, “have you heard? Have you seen the paper?”

  I hadn’t seen the paper. I lived like an ignorant pig farmer in a sagging shack three miles from the nearest hardtop road. “Heard what?”

  “Jerpbak. They got him.”

  “Who?” I cried, believing, disbelieving, already lit with a rush of anticipatory joy, already panting. I wanted to hear the worst, the vilest details, I wanted to hear that he’d murdered his wife, vanished without a trace, been run down by a carload of ganja-crazed Rastafarians. “What are you talking about?”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” she said, skipping back to the counter for the newspaper. Befuddled, the old Winnebago pilot stood at the cash register, a two-pound ceramic plate in one hand, a sheaf of traveler’s checks in the other.

  The story was on page six, tucked away amid a clutter of birth announcements and photographs of bilious-looking Rotarians and adolescent calf-fatteners. It was simple, terse, to the point. Jerpbak had been suspended from active duty pending investigation of assault charges brought against him by the parents of two juveniles he’d taken into custody earlier in the month. Charles Fadel, Jr., 16, son of the prominent Bay Area attorney, had been admitted to the Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital in Willits suffering from facial contusions, concussion, and fractured ribs; his companion, Michael Puff, 17, of Mill Valley, had sustained minor cuts and bruises that did not require emergency care. According to the official police report, Officer Jerpbak encountered the pair at 3:45 a.m. on the sixth of October as they were hitchhiking along Route 101 just south of Willits. They allegedly refused the reasonable request of a police officer in declining to identify themselves and subsequently resisted arrest, at which time the officer was constrained to subdue them. In filing charges, the parents of the juveniles contended that the arresting officer had violated the youths’ civil rights and had used unwarranted and excessive force in detaining them. (Oh, yes. I could picture the dark road, Jerpbak wound up like a jack-in-the-box; I closed my eyes and saw the bloody kid splayed out on the nurse’s desk.) CHP officials declined comment.

  I read through the story with mounting exhilaration, then stopped to read it again, savoring the details. I clenched my fist, gritted my teeth: they were going to stick it to him, they were going to hang his ass. I felt as deeply justified, as elated and self-righteous as I had when I first heard the news of Nixon’s resignation. Jerpbak had got his comeuppance. There was justice in the world after all, justice ascendant.

  Petra and I embraced. We danced round the shop, arm in arm, homesteaders watching the Comanches retreat under the guns of the cavalry. “We’ve got to celebrate,” I said.

  Forgotten, the old man slouched behind his belly, watching us out of cloudy, lugubrious eyes. We wer
e dancing in each other’s arms; he had a bad back, bad feet and an abraded memory. “All right,” he said, setting down the plate and scrawling his signature across the face of the topmost check, “I’ll give you four hundred.”

  We went to the classiest restaurant in town, a place called Visions of Johanna that crouched like a tortoise behind the Blue Bird Motel. The cuisine was haute Mexican: cainitas, menudo, pollo en mole. We ate, we drank. The subject of niénTos, which had lain between us like the sword in Siegfried’s bed, never came up. Petra paid. Vindicated, victorious, flushed with passion, tequila and a sense of universal well-being, we went home to make triumphant love.

  That was four days ago. When the sun was shining and the fields were blooming, when God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. Now it was raining. Phil, Gesh and I slumped open-mouthed round the telephone outside the forlorn Shell station, trying to cope with the sudden, monumental, liberating effect of Dowst’s injunction. “Harvest now,” he’d said, and it was a cutting away of the bonds, a dropping of the shackles. We were grunts in the trenches and the general himself had sent us the word: we’re going home, boys!

  My mind was in ferment. I hadn’t seen Petra since the night of the restaurant, and I didn’t know when I’d see her next. We would be caught up in a seething rush of activity for the next several days, weeks even. We were harvesting. Packing up. Evacuating. And once we’d evacuated we’d have to find a place to dry, manicure, weigh and package the stuff, to say nothing of unloading it. “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got to make a phone call. Could you guys wait in the car?”