Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  “Really?” she said. “And why’s that?”

  He dropped his eyes to the comic. “Because you only have one dick.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said.

  “I’m not. It’s what Tommy said.”

  Fitz, far from supporting her, just laughed. “Maybe we should ask Tim.”

  As it turned out, Tim had taken Peggy up to his room shortly after the incident by the pool, and no one had seen either of them since, which indicated, at least to her, that they’d spent the night exploring the sacrament—and each other. At some point, Brenda had tried the door, but Tim had locked it and she was reduced to shouting accusations in the hallway till she tired of that and either went to her own room or not, nobody seemed to know. But Paulette, who was an early riser, had seen her getting into the Jeep with Carlos and her two matching pink suitcases for the flight that would take her to Mexico City and from there across the continent to Boston, a place that seemed as remote as the moon from this perspective. They’d all have to go back—and soon—but the thought was just a blip on her radar as the smell of jasmine drifted across the patio on a soft ocean breeze and Reina set a cup of coffee and a plate of huevos rancheros, salsa and tortillas before her.

  “Muchas gracias,” she said, and then, trying out her Spanish, “¿Cómo está usted?”

  “Muy bien,” Reina returned, showing her teeth in a bright pleased smile. She was in her mid-twenties but looked younger, with a bush of black hair she tied back in a ponytail. “¿Y usted?”

  “Muy bien.”

  Since that exhausted her Spanish, she just smiled back until Reina dipped her head in acknowledgment, scooped up the dirty plates and went back to the kitchen, at which point Corey, who’d been squirming in his seat during this exchange, folded back a page of his comic and held it out so Fitz, who did know Spanish, or a whole lot more than she did, could see it. “Dad?” he said.

  Fitz looked up. “Yes?”

  “What’s a mentiroso?”

  The comic—he angled it so she could see it now too—showed a pair of cowboys with wide-brimmed Mexican hats, neckerchiefs and holstered guns. One, who was quite obviously the good guy, had his hand twisted around the bad guy’s neckerchief and was saying, “Usted es un mentiroso, señor,” which was surely some sort of insult or curse, but what exactly?

  “Mentiroso?” Fitz said, setting his book down on the table. “That’d be a liar. Let’s see if I can remember: Miento, I lie; mientes, you lie, familiar; miente, he, she or it lies; mentimos, we lie, and so on—mienten, they lie. You really should learn the forms of the verbs if you’re going to pick up Spanish, I mean, that’s the first thing . . .”

  “And what’s the second thing?”

  “That’s easy—the language of love. Te amo, mi amor, you know that one?”

  “Not really.”

  “Go try it on Nancy—she’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?”

  Corey didn’t blush, though she expected him to. He just said, “Yeah, I guess.”

  On the weekend before they closed down Freedom House and headed back home for good, everyone agreed they should throw a party and trip as a group—no guides, no restrictions, no write-ups—just let the drug take them where it would. People dressed up for the occasion, but fancifully, almost as if it were Halloween, the girls in the bright flaring skirts, peasant blouses and silver necklaces they’d bought in the market stalls, the men in guayaberas and sombreros. Tim invited the mayor and his cohort and hired mariachis to provide music for the party, which started in the late afternoon with a lavish spread—pozole, carnitas, chilaquiles, flautas con pollo, shrimp, lobster, fish—for those who wanted it, though most of the inner circle wound up eating sparingly so as not to interfere with the sacrament, which they all took an hour before the guests arrived so as to be primed for the moment the festivities started in earnest. As for the kids, they would be on their own, which was just fine with them since the summer had set them free too and any sort of parental supervision wasn’t much more than an afterthought at this juncture.

  She was in their room, sitting before the mirror and doing her face for the party—false lashes, eye shadow, Mexican lipstick in a shade of red so bright it could have brought the dead back to life, and why not vamp it up?—when Corey slammed through the door in his bleached-out shorts and started rummaging through the backpack he kept under the cot. “Mom,” he said, “have you seen my mask and snorkel?”

  She lifted her eyes to him in the mirror and she asked, “Aren’t you going to change for the party?”

  “Change what?”

  “I don’t know, put on a shirt, for starters—and your other shorts, the ones you hardly ever wear? And wash your feet—when was the last time you washed your feet?”

  Fitz was sitting on the bed in the pristine white guayabera she’d bought him in the market the day before and a pair of blue jeans she’d ironed so they’d have a nice crisp crease down the front of each leg. “Yeah,” he said, “spruce up a bit, champ, get in the spirit of things. There’s going to be dancing—don’t you want to dance?”

  Corey was on his knees, bent over the backpack, his feet splayed behind him. “I don’t know.”

  “What about Nancy—she’ll dance with you, won’t she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, why don’t you ask her and find out? But first, go into the bathroom and wash your feet. And put on a shirt like your mother says.”

  Fitz got up then, went to the closet for the sombrero she’d bought him, cocked it back on his head and asked, “How do I look?” He winked at her in the mirror. “Like a red-haired Mexican? Or no: an Irish Mexican?”

  “You look fine,” she said, and she was feeling good, not only in anticipation of the party but because she could feel the drug already beginning to work on her, the familiar crepitation in her bloodstream, the ever-so-subtle alteration in the frequency of the light, objects beginning to shift out of the material world and into another world altogether.

  “What about you, Corey? You think I look Mexican?”

  Corey studied him a moment, as if the question were in any way serious. “You look like my father.”

  “Okay, that’s what I want to hear—so you must be Mexican then too. Digame in español, mi hijo.”

  Corey said, “What?” and she said, “Just put on a shirt, that’s all I ask.”

  The next day, their last day there, when all she wanted to do was lie on the beach and feel sorry for herself, Tim had arranged a softball game—For goodwill, because we’ve got a two-summer lease on this place and we’ll be back before you know it—and they all had to pile into the Jeep and a pair of Volkswagen vans and go out in the heat and through the village and its stew of smells to a grass field adjacent to the airstrip and wade through the afternoon. Of course, with Tim (and Fitz and Ken and Charlie) everything was an occasion for a party, and the beer flowed and vendors were there to sell tacos and the whole town turned out to make it a holiday and say adios to the gringos from Harvard. She was surprised by the number of people there and it wasn’t till later that she learned the reason why: the local newspaper had promoted the game as being between the local semi-pro team, Los águilas, and Los Rojos de Harvard, as if the Crimson baseball squad had flown down from Cambridge for the event. The fact was, the party had gone on till dawn and Tim was lucky to be able to field a team at all, with Tommy Hitchcock on the mound, Fitz at shortstop, Dick at second, a very shaky Martin at third, Tim himself at first, Carlos pressed into service behind the plate, Ken in center field, Charlie in left and nobody in right.

  She sat on a blanket with Fanchon, Alice and Susannah, sipping a beer and shading herself with a parasol Carlos had provided, and though she felt a bit queasy, whether from the heat or the excesses of the night before or a touch of turista, she didn’t know. The party had kept on accelerating and accelerating, as if the earth were a big baseball rocketing high into the deepest reaches of space, and what she’d done or where she’d been was a myst
ery, though she remembered Corey and Nancy popping up out of nowhere wearing big grinning lizard faces and the Mexicans throwing up pyramids block by massive block till they were all buried under them and that she’d gone up to the lifeguard tower with somebody—Ken—and watched the full moon scrawl its icy script across the face of every wave in existence. Persistent waves. Waves that never stopped.

  But this was baseball. All right. Fine. She liked baseball well enough, so that wasn’t the problem. Fitz liked it too. And Corey lived and breathed it. She’d wanted Corey to sit with her but he preferred the company of the other kids, who settled in on their own blanket up the right-field sideline, where they were well supplied with Soldado de Chocolate, Naranja Crush and the taquitos one of the village women was selling for what amounted to a nickel apiece. The beer only seemed to make her stomach clench, but she finished the first and had Corey go get her another—another round for everybody—because she was here and this was their last day and she needed something to make her forget about the trip back to a place where she’d have to face the uncertainty of no job and no apartment all over again.

  The visitors were up first. Tim led off himself, and while he cocked the bat over his shoulder and made a parody of menacing gestures, he never swung at all and wound up with a walk. The same thing happened with the second batter, Fitz, and then Ken, who was up third. Nobody swung at anything, but you could feel the intensity of their concentration, which Alice said was almost Zen-like, and here was another proposition: Did LSD enhance athletic prowess? Did it eliminate the psychological element and bring the randomness of the world under control? Maybe. Maybe so. Tommy Hitchcock—twenty-two, lean, boyish, quick as any lizard—hit the first pitch presented to him over the center field fence for a grand slam and suddenly she was on her feet, leaping and dancing and cheering as if she were in high school all over again. Baseball, they were playing baseball in Mexico, and wasn’t that something? Alice shrieked, “Go, Crimson!” and everybody mobbed Tommy when he cruised across the plate.

  It was eight to nothing in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Mexicans silent while she, Alice and Fanchon served as cheerleaders for the Rojos and the beer bottles made a pyramid of their own, when Tim called time-out and went to the mound to have a word with Tommy, who to this point had allowed only two hits. What he said to him, she didn’t know, or not exactly, but it was apparent that in the interest of goodwill, not to mention international relations, he’d told Tommy to go easy, let them hit the ball, tie it up, win even . . .

  Corey was outraged. When the Águilas scored their seventh run, he stamped across the grass and flung himself angrily down beside her on the blanket. “I can’t believe this!” he said. “They’re throwing the game!”

  “They just want to be nice, that’s all.”

  “Nice? Baseball isn’t about being nice. Baseball’s . . . baseball. It’s about winning.”

  She looked out across the field, the colors so intense they were like living things, the green of the grass rippling with a cool fire, the faces of her players—of her husband, Ken, Tim, all of them—gone beyond the uniform white of Harvard and the Nordic races into another spectrum altogether and every dress on every woman in the crowd was as bright as the sun itself. It was a moment of release. She could feel it all go out of her like a long withheld breath. She was leaving in the morning, but she was part of this, part of the team, and she’d be back.

  “No,” she said. “That’s where you’re wrong. It’s about playing the game.”

  2.

  She’d never slept with another man until that first summer in Mexico when it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t even think twice about it. She was tripping and so was Ken. Fitz wasn’t there. Fanchon wasn’t there. She and Ken were in the lifeguard tower together and the whole world was disarranged. Clothes—her two-piece, his bathing trunks—were encumbrances, worse than useless, the invention of a society they were no longer a part of, a screen designed to keep you from your authentic self. What mattered was touch. The touch of the sun on her face, her breasts, her belly, the touch of his fingers that sent sparks of fire through her so that she could see them as if she were riding through her own veins and jumping the synapses of her nerves till it felt so good she never wanted it to stop.

  There was Charlie too and one of the other men, she didn’t even remember who anymore, that first summer blurring with the second so that it was difficult to distinguish them except that during the second summer, when Tim had abandoned Harvard without even finishing out the spring semester and got himself fired in the aftermath, there were strangers there, paying guests of what Tim was now calling the Castalia Foundation after the fellowship of mystic scientists in Hesse’s Magister Ludi. What he was thinking, and she couldn’t blame him really, was that there was money to be made from this new field of psychedelic therapy, and if people wanted to come down to Mexico and pay the foundation two hundred dollars a week for the privilege of having guided sessions with him, all the better—he could pay the bills without having to rely on Harvard or Peggy or anyone else, broaden his base and get the message out to the larger society while pushing the research ever further. She saw the logic in it, but she wasn’t really happy about it. They were harmless enough, these new people, poets, professors, businessmen, a psychiatrist from Berkeley and his wife and kids, but they were strangers too and the hotel felt less like their own transpersonative community where group mind could flourish (the synchronicity, the coincidences that weren’t coincidences at all, knowing what somebody was going to say before they even opened their mouth) than the kind of impersonal place you could have found anywhere in the world, with people you didn’t know and didn’t particularly care about sitting across from you at breakfast.

  The one incident from that second summer that stuck out—that was embedded in her brain, actually—was the one that ultimately brought the whole thing down and sent her, Fitz and Corey on a hellish premature trip across the brown back of Mexico, up into the featureless flats of Texas and on through the heart of the Deep South to the frigid waters of the Jersey Shore, where there were no palm trees, no margaritas and, worst of all, no sessions in the lifeguard tower, no sessions at all. It was a disaster and it broke her heart—and Corey’s too, Corey’s more than anybody’s. He’d looked forward to Mexico all winter, talking about nothing but the fish, the iguanas, the tacos and taquitos and Soldados de Chocolate and laying out an elaborate schedule of what he was going to do on the first day and the second day and so on. And she was as eager as he was, the winter hanging like a gray sheet over Boston, her waitressing job not only exhausting but a humiliation too (they’d filled her position at the library and her supervisor was very sorry but they had nothing else for her at the moment) and their apartment even more cramped, drafty and depressing than the one they’d given up. She’d tried not to be bitter. She slogged through her days thinking of Mexico and only that. And then what? They no sooner got there than the whole thing came crashing down—and why? Because Tim was a jerk, that was why. Because Tim never listened to a word anybody said. Because he thought he was God.

  The problem was publicity—too much publicity. If it was up to her, which it wasn’t and never would be, she would have kept things quiet, contained, with access limited to the circle of people who really counted, but that wasn’t the way Tim saw things. Restraint wasn’t in his vocabulary. He was a promoter, an impresario, a showboat, giving lectures around the country on the benefits of mind expansion, writing articles, sitting for interviews, always talking, talking, talking. He hired a PR firm to publicize the summer sessions and roped Fitz into writing up the prospectus, and people responded, all the sessions fully subscribed, which would have been fine, just fine, but for the explosion of negative press, beginning with headlines like HARVARD DRUG PROF FIRED AND PARADISE IN MEXICO—2 FIRED HARVARD PROFS OPEN COMMUNAL HOTEL and finally just devolving to DRUG HOTEL and TRIPPING ON THE BEACH. None of the articles mentioned science, therapy, the
quest for knowledge, breaking set or lifting imprints, but only drug use, topless women and promiscuous sex. All of which was true, of course, but in a way the sensationalists could never have imagined.

  Fitz mentioned it to Tim the day they arrived—in a cautionary way, as in, Aren’t you inviting trouble?—but Tim laughed it off.

  They were out on the pool deck in their bathing suits, sipping their first margaritas of the summer, and she’d just handed Tim a folder of press clippings they’d collected on the way down. Tim was stretched out on a recliner, his body deeply tanned, his hair bleached from the sun. He looked good, fit, much younger than his years, but then he always looked good. It was genetic. Some people aged more quickly than others, some went to fat, some developed cellulite and skin like an iguana’s. But not Tim. Tim never changed.

  Ken and Fanchon were there too, along with Charlie and Alice and two of the new people whose names she hadn’t caught. Everybody was drinking margaritas except Tim and Charlie, who were doing the salt, lime, and shot glass ritual.

  “Huge thanks, Joanie,” Tim said, riffling through the clippings without seeming to take much notice of them. “Is that a new swimsuit? Yes? It looks great. You look great—doesn’t she, Fitz?”

  Her husband had painted his nose with zinc oxide and it seemed to draw in all the light till it gleamed like a hundred-watt bulb. His shoulders—good shoulders, strong shoulders—glistened with the tanning lotion she’d rubbed on them before coming down from their room. The hairs on his chest formed two broad wings around his nipples and they were the palest red, almost translucent. Everything about him glowed. The pool danced and shimmered behind him. They were in Mexico. In the sun. And it was glorious. “She does,” he said, nodding in Tim’s direction. “But when you have a chance, look at those articles, will you? Because some of them—”

  “Will do,” Tim said, bringing a hand up to shade his eyes, though he was wearing his dark glasses, “and this is great, thanks, but what were you going to say? Some of them, what? Attack us? Try to belittle what we’re doing down here as if they knew the first thing about it?”