Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  “Joanie and I were just concerned you might be attracting too much attention, if you know what I mean.”

  Tim laughed. “You hear that, Ken? Fitz is worried. Jesus, Fitz”—turning back to her husband now—“you sound like Dick. Dick’s mantra is less is more and I’ve been hearing it till it’s coming out my ears. Or at least one ear.” He gave them a self-effacing smile and pointed to his bad ear, which was free of its hearing aid because hearing aids and swimming pools didn’t make for a good match. “But you know what I say?”

  He paused, grinning, and looked around at them one by one till somebody said, “No, what?”

  The sun was like a hot iron and her back felt like the ironing board itself. In a minute, as soon as she finished her margarita and ordered another one, she was going to take a dip in the pool. Tim’s question hung there until she really didn’t care what he thought, one way or the other. He was a magician, their magician, and whatever he didn’t like—bad press, the academic game, Harvard—he could just make disappear with a flick of his magic wand. What, me worry?

  Tim dropped his eyes to the shot glass, poured himself another and went through the ritual of sprinkling salt on the webbing of his left hand, licking it off, throwing back the tequila as if he were snapping it out of the air and grimacing over the wedge of lime. “I say all publicity’s good publicity, that’s what I say.” He reached out a hand, put it on Fitz’s knee and gave a squeeze. “Right, Fitz?”

  “Right,” her husband said because there really was nothing else he could say.

  “Okay, then,” Tim said, giving everybody one of his stagey open-mouthed winks. “Let’s drink on it.”

  The accounting came two weeks later. They’d barely settled into the routine—she and Fitz were planning on spending the full summer this time—and all she wanted out of life was more of the same, more living in the moment under a sun that never faltered, more sessions, more abandonment of the ego and tuning in to the group mind as if she were fine-tuning the dial on an FM radio, when what had seemed an unlikely, even paranoid, threat in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, a nagging worst-case scenario that would never come to pass, came to pass.

  It was morning, post-breakfast. She was sitting in a wicker chair on the patio with a book and a glass of lemonade. Corey was out somewhere with the other kids, bodysurfing, scrambling up the cliffs, stalking through the jungle catching and killing things, whatever kids do, and she’d never seen him happier. Fitz was up in their room, working on his thesis proposal, which he was forging ahead with even though he no longer had a thesis adviser and would have to go crawling to McClelland or whoever when they got back in the fall. The only sound came from Pedro, who was on his perch by the fountain, preening his feathers and muttering to himself.

  She wouldn’t have looked up at all, wouldn’t even have noticed the man, but for the noise his shoes made clicking across the tiles. That in itself was unusual because nobody bothered with footwear here except the hotel staff—and they all wore huaraches that barely whispered as they went silently about their tasks. She glanced up and saw the man coming toward her, a Mexican in his forties, dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt, pressed trousers and gleaming black boots, the pointed toes of which were decorated with silver chevrons that caught and released the light in a strangely hypnotic way. He stopped beside her chair and presented her with a wide ingratiating smile. “Buenos días, señora,” he said, and without waiting for her to return the greeting, which she would have liked to do because she was trying to practice her Spanish as much as possible, he asked, “You are Mrs. Doctor Leary?”

  She was so surprised by this she let out a laugh. She married to Tim? “Me? No, no: Tim isn’t married. Dr. Leary, I mean. He’s a widower.”

  The man gave her a puzzled look.

  “His wife is dead,” she said.

  Still nothing.

  “He has no wife,” she said, carefully enunciating each word.

  The man’s smile returned. “I see,” he said. “Muy triste, no? But”—he gestured to the chair beside hers—“do you mind?”

  Before she could answer, he’d swiveled the chair neatly around so that it was facing her and lowered himself into it. “Excuse me,” he murmured, “but I am Dr. Dionisio Padilla, of the Psychological Institute? A colleague of Dr. Leary? And you are—?”

  “I’m”—she hesitated. What was she: a student, a friend, a fellow seeker? “One of his, that is, my husband is one of his grad students?”

  “I see,” he said. He was sitting too close to her, so close their knees were practically touching. “And your name?”

  She gave it without hesitation, though she was beginning to feel uncomfortable and she couldn’t have said why. The man seemed innocuous enough. A fellow psychologist. A colleague. But he didn’t know Tim, that was obvious.

  “And so,” he said, smiling still and holding her with his eyes, “your husband is participating in Dr. Leary’s sessions, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you?”

  “Yes, me too.”

  He was silent a moment. Pedro began rustling on his perch and let out a single shrill “Caramba!” before hopping down and strutting across the patio in his bow-legged gait.

  “Tell me,” the man said, “because this is of great interest—do you all, the whole class, that is, take the drug at once?”

  “No,” she said, “no, not at all. The idea is to stagger the days and limit the experience to once a week so the newcomers—the students—can adjust and learn. They attend seminars. They’re assigned readings in the field. And they fill out questionnaires and write up reports of their experiences, which, of course, are different for everyone.”

  “And you—you are a student also? Or merely the wife of a student?”

  The question took her by surprise. Again: What was she? What were Fanchon, Alice, Peggy, any of them? Why was she in Mexico? Why had she gone to Tim and Dick’s house on alternate Saturdays throughout the fall, winter and spring? She was shaking her head very slowly. “No,” she murmured, “I’m not a student.” A beat went by. She stared into his deep unblinking eyes as if in a trance. “Just,” she said, “a wife.”

  “I see,” he said. “But then, if you are not a student of Dr. Leary, then why do you participate in his sessions? Why do you take this drug, which can be quite dangerous, you know that, don’t you?”

  She was thinking of the last time, two nights ago, when she and Fitz had gone up to the lifeguard tower and she watched the world peel away, layer by layer, as if she were deconstructing it herself and how when they’d had sex she was able to be both inside and outside her body at the same time and how they’d lain in each other’s arms till dawn. She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “For enlightenment.”

  He just stared at her. His smile had faded, but now it came back. “I see,” he said. “Yes. That makes perfect sense.”

  Three days later, the man was back. This time he had another man with him and they were both wearing gun belts and holding black felt hats delicately in their hands, as if afraid of crushing them. She’d just taken a swim and was sitting on the pool deck with Alice, Fanchon and Paulette Roberts, while Tim, who’d been in the conference room working on updating The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a kind of guide to the psychedelic experience, had just come out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air. He was wearing a white cotton T-shirt, white shorts and tennis sneakers, as if to contrast with the two men in black, who had clicked across the patio and down the steps into the pool area. The one she knew—and knew now was no professor—called out, “Dr. Leary, is that you?” in a voice full of false heartiness.

  She remembered Tim turning around then, his face lighting up with his usual anticipatory grin till he got a better look at the two black-clad men striding toward him and the grin faltered. He looked bewildered in that moment, as if he knew exactly what was to come and yet somehow didn’t, as if he were immune to the hurts and persecutions of the world. But of course, he wa
sn’t. And neither was she. Or Fitz. Or Corey.

  Both men had reached Tim now and stood there at the edge of the pool, arms akimbo, until in a movement so graceful it might have been choreographed, they simultaneously reached up and positioned the hats on their heads. The one she knew introduced himself as an officer of the Federal Judicial Police and handed Tim a single folded sheet of paper. “What is this?” Tim demanded.

  The man touched the brim of his hat, almost as if he were about to deliver a salute. “It is, Dr. Leary, a deportation order.”

  In that moment, Tim looked suddenly old, stricken, his shoulders slumped and his muscles gone slack. He was trying to find his grin but couldn’t quite manage it. No one moved. The gurgle of the pool’s filter grew louder and louder till it was unbearable. Before she could think, she was up out of her deck chair and coming toward him, a pulse of outrage flashing through her—and not just for this Judas of a policeman (colleague: yeah, right), but for Tim too, because how could he be so careless, so stupid, and what did this mean? What? That they were all to be deported too, as—as undesirables? Drug users? Criminals? Didn’t these people know what this was all about? Didn’t they understand?

  “Deportation?” Tim echoed. “You must be crazy.”

  “You are a psychologist,” the man said, the one she knew. “Look at me and then take a look at yourself engaging in all manner of degenerate behavior under the guise of science, and you tell me who is crazy. This is a Christian country, Doctor. This is a country ruled by moral principle.”

  She was right there now, right there beside them, and she reached out to pluck at the sleeve of the one she knew. “You,” she said. “You lied to me. You’re no colleague.”

  The man looked down at her hand on his arm and smiled softly, a smile of the lips only, as if all this was faintly amusing. The other man, who’d stood stiffly at attention to this point, now seemed tensed for action, and she realized, with a start of alarm, that if the one she knew were but to give the word, this one would show no restraint. “I am sorry,” he said, still with that soft smile, then turned his gaze back to Tim, whose own smile had come back now, huge, toothy, titanic, as if to say everything was all right and always would be, nothing to worry about, just the smallest misunderstanding, that was all.

  “On what grounds?” Tim said, smiling still.

  “Read the order,” the other man said, the one she didn’t know. He was short, there were red flecks in his eyes and he regarded Tim steadily, as if he knew his kind—a perpetrator like any other, the lowest of the low—and wouldn’t think twice about reaching for his handcuffs if that was what it would take.

  “Running a business without a license,” the first one said. “As an alien. That is the official offense, and the most convenient way to be rid of you. But if you’d really like to know it’s because of this.” And here he handed Tim a pair of rolled-up newspapers, which, as she was later to learn, accused them all of being a cult purveying “marijuana orgies, hairy women, black magic, venereal disease and profiteering.” They were even tied to the death of a woman none of them had ever seen or heard of, whose body was found in a village more than a hundred miles away, which made for a front-page story under the headline HARVARD DRUG ORGY BLAMED FOR DECOMPOSING BODY.

  Alice, who was right behind her, said, “But this is ridiculous. We have a lease on this property. We’re scientists!”

  Somehow, though, the claim itself seemed ridiculous, coming as it was from a barefooted woman in a bikini, and in that moment, Joanie saw the truth of it—they were ridiculous and all their beliefs and aspirations were laughable in the eyes of the authorities, of the stooges who ran things in a world of closed-off minds and seekers after nothing but more of the same. She took in the scenario—Tim in white, the federales in black, the women in a display of flesh—turned her back on them, dove into the pool and went all the way down till she touched bottom.

  3.

  The previous year, after they’d all got back from Mexico, Dick Alpert had bought a house in Newton a few blocks from the one Tim had leased from the irate professor of international law (who was suing him for damages). The idea was to keep the inner circle together, to keep the experiment of Zihuatanejo in full flower, and most of the core group moved in, including Tim and his kids, Ken and Fanchon, Charlie and Alice, Rick and Paulette Roberts and their two kids and an assortment of unattached grad students. She and Fitz had been invited to join them—expressly, both by Dick and Tim—but in the end, though they hashed it out over the course of three excruciating days, they declined. She’d wanted to say yes, an enthusiastic yes, because she’d re-imprinted on the whole group (her brothers and sisters, as she’d begun to think of them, her family, her true family) and it was so powerful, so far beyond anything in her experience, she couldn’t imagine having her frame of reference reduced to three again. But Fitz, who’d been so jealous of Ken and Fanchon when they’d first moved into Tim’s, was the one who nixed it. He needed to focus on his studies, that’s what he said, that’s what he insisted upon, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to do it in an atmosphere where somebody was bound to be tripping no matter what hour of the day or what day of the week it was. “Look, Joanie,” he pleaded, and he was pleading with himself as much as with her, “if I don’t bear down here we’re going to wind up back in Beacon—or worse.”

  “You can always go to the library,” she said.

  “It’s not that—it’s the evenings, the nights. You know how it is—a nonstop party. Which is great, I’m not saying it isn’t. But what am I supposed to do? Lock myself in my room?”

  Something sang in her head then, a snatch of one of the ragas Tim liked to play during sessions—an aural flashback, she thought: How about that?—and through the chiming of the sitar and the thump of the tablas she said, “We could try. And if it doesn’t work out—”

  “What? Go out and try to find a place in the middle of the semester? Are you crazy? We’re talking about my degree here, Joanie, my life. I mean, do you really want to go back to being married to a high school psychologist?”

  So they got an apartment that was like a prison cell and if it wasn’t for the Saturdays at Tim and Dick’s—every other Saturday, that is, as Fitz decreed it—she would have hanged herself. Sure. Fine. It was Fitz’s decision because it was Fitz’s degree—Fitz’s life—and her life was reduced to cooking and cleaning and hustling for tips in a too-short skirt at a diner full of Greek and Italian immigrants who kept telling her how great she looked, how hot, how sex-ee. And now, after the disaster that was Zihuatanejo and an endless drive across country with a depressed husband and a withdrawn son (You want to stop for a cheeseburger, Corey? I want a taco. How about clam strips? At Howard Johnson’s? Your favorite, right? I want a taco), they were right back in Boston and right back in the same boat. Only this time they didn’t have the option of going to Dick’s because Dick was done with Harvard and so was Tim and nobody really knew what to do since the rest of the inner circle was left out in the cold too.

  Desperate, they went back to their landlord from the previous spring, but he had nothing for them, and then they tried the building where they’d had their first apartment only to find that it had changed hands and the new owners were renovating. They went through every listing in the want ads and dragged themselves from one place to another, but just about everything was gone by the time they got there and what wasn’t was so shabby—no curtains, no blinds, no shower, refrigerators crusted in filth, silverfish, cockroaches, mouse turds scattered like rye seed across the kitchen counter and buried in the burners of the stove—she got a headache just walking through the door. In the meanwhile, they were staying in a motel all the way out in Waltham, living off what was left of their savings and the check her father had given her to tide them over when they left New Jersey, and clearly that wasn’t sustainable.

  And then it was the Labor Day weekend—ninety-two degrees, the sun like a hammer and the sidewalks burning right through the soles of your s
hoes. They could have been celebrating the holiday, picnicking in the park, flipping burgers on a charcoal grill and tossing a Frisbee back and forth like any other family, but they weren’t. Corey was due to start school the next day, Fitz the day after that. She hadn’t even begun to look for a job because there wasn’t much point if you didn’t have a place to live—and how could she leave a call-back number if she didn’t have a phone? Her stomach was a vat of acid. She couldn’t sleep. Mexico, if she thought about it at all, was just a cruel joke.

  They were sitting in a deserted diner in Boston at half past one on Labor Day afternoon, she, Fitz and Corey, staring down at plates of the lunch special (macaroni and cheese with a boiled pink hot dog and pale green pickle triangulating the plate) while a fan on the counter shifted the air and set it right back in place again. She was sweating, her blouse stuck to her skin and the hair at the nape of her neck as wet as if she’d just stepped out of the shower. They’d spent the morning tramping up and down stairs, going from one place to another, depressed, angry, willing at this point to take anything so long as it had four walls and a roof, but either no one answered the bell or some exhausted-looking middle-aged drone pulled open the door, croaked “Already taken,” and slammed it shut again. Just now, just before they’d given up and slouched in for lunch—an iced tea, she was dying for an iced tea—they’d gone back to the apartment with the mouse turds, only to find that it too had been taken by somebody whose level of desperation must have been positively Dostoevskian, and now they were here, in the deserted diner, hating themselves and each other too.

  “I want to go back,” Corey said, pinching his voice in a whine of irritation. She could see he had no intention of eating the macaroni, which he’d separated into five ragged lumps surrounding the hot dog, from which he’d cut a single slice after lathering it with mustard, ketchup and piccalilli relish. He was slumped against the cracked leatherette of the booth, a comic book in one hand, a cherry Coke in the other. His mood, ever since they’d been deported from Mexico and stretching through all of July and August at her parents’, had been poisonous. He barely spoke anymore. And where he’d once reveled in the shore, in fishing, crabbing, boating, he’d spent most of the summer sulking in his room. She’d begun to worry about him and so had Fitz. But Fitz was so depressed himself he couldn’t seem to lift himself off the lawn chair in her parents’ backyard.