Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  “Go back where?” Fitz asked.

  “The motel.”

  “You know we can’t do that,” she said, her tone flat and instructive. “If you want, we can drop you at the park and your father and I’ll go on looking. You don’t have to come. Not unless you want some say in what your room’s going to look like, that is.”

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  And then Fitz started in. “I told you we shouldn’t have spent so long in New Jersey.”

  “It was cheap,” she said. “How was I to know everything’d be taken already? Last year—”

  “We found a craphole, right? And we’d be head over heels if we could only get it back again. I mean, this is ridiculous.”

  “Last year,” she went on, ignoring him, “we had our choice of places and the only reason we wound up where we did was because it was so close to Corey’s school, if you remember. So don’t blame me. I’m not the one who got us kicked out of Mexico—and my parents really went out of their way for us. Which was a blessing. And you know it.”

  Save your money, her mother would say every time she and Fitz offered to pay for groceries, and her father had been more than generous, especially when the car died and he just outright gave them her mother’s station wagon. They had the beach, littleneck clams, sweet corn, their own room with a queen bed and a separate room for Corey. And all for free. It could have been fun, had been fun for all those years of the past, but it wasn’t Mexico. And the depressing thing—the truly depressing thing—was that Mexico was never going to happen again.

  “I’m not saying that.” Fitz was bent over his plate, impaling the last few scraps of macaroni on the tines of his fork. “I’m just saying I wish we’d come back earlier. I wish we’d got our shit together instead of—”

  “‘Shit together’? You sound like Charlie.”

  “—instead of putting everything off and sitting there drinking gin and tonic like it was going out of style. And Charlie and Alice got a place, if you want to know. Two bedrooms, sixty a month.”

  “Where?”

  “Roxbury.”

  “Roxbury? But that’s in the ghetto?”

  “They don’t have to worry about school districts.”

  They both looked to Corey then, who still hadn’t touched his food. He was staring fixedly at his comic book as if none of this concerned him.

  “Hey, champ,” Fitz said, “—if you’re not going to eat that, do you mind?”

  And Corey, without glancing up, just shoved the plate across to him.

  They finally found a place within walking distance of Corey’s school—a godsend, absolutely—and she picked up a temporary job as a receptionist at a dentist’s office that would help tide them over till Fitz’s teaching stipend kicked in at the end of the month. The apartment was on the ground floor of a brick building that looked as if it had been around since the Revolutionary War and could actually, from a certain angle and in a certain light, be described as charming. It had the requisite two bedrooms and an enclosed porch and was ten dollars a month cheaper than what they’d paid for their last apartment. The only problem was that the landlord had given the previous tenant—an old woman in a grimy neck brace who was headed to the nursing home—an extra two weeks to vacate, so they couldn’t move in till the fifteenth. Which meant draining even more income on the motel (which did, thank God, have weekly rates) and eating out two meals a day, breakfast emerging from a cardboard cereal box and whatever she could manage to fix on a hot plate.

  Was it miserable? Was it their low point? Was the group mind all but extinguished and higher consciousness to be replaced by the great shining hope of moving into a ground-floor apartment that would forever stink of old lady, not to mention her two cats? She tried not to think about it. Actually, she was scrambling so hard just to keep things together she didn’t have time to think. What she knew was this: their clothes and furniture were in storage and on the fifteenth they would no longer be. On that day they would take them out of storage, make ten trips back and forth in the station wagon, arrange the furniture in the new apartment, stow the pots and pans under the sink and hang their winter clothes in the closets. Then she would go shopping for the essentials, fix dinner, and their lives would go on. That was it. And it was a whole lot better than nothing.

  Then one evening, after the dentist had drilled and filled his last cavity of the day and she’d picked Corey up in front of the school where he’d been waiting for two hours, since none of the school buses ran as far out as Waltham, she pulled into the motel lot and saw, with a flash of irritation, that someone was parked in the spot reserved for their room and that all the other spots—what else?—were already taken. “Shit,” she cursed, pounding the wheel with the flat of one hand. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  The heat was relentless, radiating up off the pavement in a reek of tar and petrochemicals. Corey, slouched in the passenger’s seat, hadn’t said more than ten words since he’d climbed into the car, and he didn’t say anything now. He just looked at her as if she were some previously unknown life-form he found only minimally interesting, Corey, who’d been the center of her life, whom she’d raised to be articulate and outgoing and who’d shared a special vocabulary with her—their own private language—until he’d stopped using it and she’d stopped too and it vanished without a trace, another of the lost languages of the world.

  “What?” she demanded. “What are you looking at me like that for?” The car was in drive still and she had to fight down the impulse to take her foot off the brake and smash everything in front of her. “Shit!” she repeated. “Shit!”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he gathered up his books, clutched them under one arm and swung open the car door.

  “What are you doing?”

  His face, in the hard hot light, was no longer the face of a child. He was fifteen. He was as tall as she was. He gave her a grimace, as if all this—the parking lot, the two hours waiting in front of the school, his mother—was too much for him. “Going in?” he said, making a question of it.

  “You mean you’re not going to help me?”

  “Help you what?”

  “Find a spot, for God’s sake—I mean, is that too much to ask? And the groceries—what about the groceries?”

  He slipped out of the car with the agility of an escape artist, slammed the door so hard the chassis rocked, then crossed the lot to their room, inserted the key in the lock and disappeared inside.

  She stared at the door in disbelief, the anger rising in her, everything so petty, so futile. The heat slammed at her. The clock on the dashboard inched forward. Finally—these were the conditions of her life, this blistering lot, this obscenely ugly motel and more of the same, more, more, more—she reversed the car, the transmission whining, and made a slow circuit of the parking lot till a space appeared on the far side of the building, right next to the dumpster, the funk of which nearly made her gag. Gathering up the two bags of groceries, the newspaper and her purse, she started down the walkway, feeling as tired, angry and empty as she’d ever felt in her life. She didn’t even want to think about dinner. Last night they’d had cheese sandwiches, washed down with a cheap rosé wine that tasted like aluminum and tonight would be no different, unless they went out to a burger stand. But she didn’t feel like going out. She didn’t feel like anything. She just wanted to crawl into bed, crank up the air conditioner and watch the TV that was bolted to the wall over the plasticized desk/bureau combo until she fell away into oblivion.

  When she got to the door of their room, just as she was juggling the bags of groceries and her purse and trying to fit the key in the lock, she threw a glance at the car taking up their assigned spot with the number—19—painted right there on the pavement in white numerals nobody could miss, something arrested her, something clicked, and she saw that this car, a standard black VW Bug that seemed no different from a thousand others, was somehow familiar. Then she heard a shriek of laughter from within—Fanchon’s laughter—and
felt the burden drop from her.

  Ken, Fanchon and Alice were stretched out on the queen-sized bed, their backs propped against the wall, feet bare, glasses of what appeared to be—what was—gin and tonic in their hands. The bottles stood on the end table, along with three limes, one of which had been cut in wedges and sat glistening in a puddle of its own juice. Fresh lime. The smell was enchanting—right, just right, perfect—and it drove down all the foul reek of the parking lot and flipped her mood as automatically as if a switch had been thrown. “My God!” she said, the groceries still clutched to her chest, “this is a surprise, I mean the best, the best surprise I could—my God, I can’t believe it!”

  In the next moment they were all on their feet, embracing, including Fitz, who’d been sitting in the sole chair in the room, grinning woozily over the rim of his own gin and tonic. Even Corey, who was propped up on the counter by the sink, digging into a bag of potato chips, seemed animated—this was new, this was different, and it had the distinct flavor of Mexico.

  Ken—he looked better than ever, in a pair of tight white chinos and a navy shirt open at the neck so you could see the gold cross he’d taken to wearing in Mexico, in memoriam, he said, of a dead religion—squeezed her so hard he took the breath out of her. “Did you hear the news?” he chimed, leaning back from her as if they were dancing and he was about to execute a double dip and twirl her under one arm.

  “News?” she repeated, gazing round at the grinning faces, everybody grinning, even Corey.

  “We’re celebrating tonight,” Ken said. “We’re all going out, my treat.”

  “Yay!” Corey crowed, jumping down from the counter. “Pizza. Let’s go for pizza!”

  “What is it?” she asked. “What are you talking about? Don’t keep me in suspense—”

  “It’s Tim,” Ken said, but before he could say more, Fanchon slipped an arm around her waist and said, “Tim has a new place, a new house—for us all!”

  A new house? She was trying to get a grasp on the news, ready to commit—more than ready—and trying to fight back a wave of anxiety, because would Fitz allow it, would Fitz see how untenable their life was the way it was presently construed, even if they were to go ahead and take their things out of storage and move into the old lady’s apartment? Would he see how much she needed this, needed Ken and Fanchon and Alice, needed Tim—and that he himself needed them too? “Where?” she asked. “Where is it?”

  Nobody answered her, but she could feel their spirits soaring.

  “Will it be—?” And here she looked to Fitz, who just smiled and lifted his glass to her. She looked round her giddily, everybody smiling, smiling, as if she were a child all over again and this were her birthday and the cake just about to be brought in, aglow with candles. “I mean, will it be big enough—I mean, for all of us?”

  Ken shrugged, gave her his secret look that this time was meant to be public and publically appreciated. “It’s a little place,” he said. “Only sixty-four rooms.”

  That wasn’t the shocker—the shocker was where the house was located. It wasn’t in Cambridge, wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t even in Massachusetts. It was in Millbrook, New York, not far from Poughkeepsie, which wasn’t far from Beacon, the very town they’d escaped from in the first place. The irony was stupendous. Or no, it wasn’t irony—it was karma. If ever there was karma involved in their lives then this was it. “Can’t you see, Fitz?” she said when they’d got back to the motel after a raucous dinner with too much beer and too much pizza and everybody talking at once and jumping up and down to feed the jukebox until Corey fell asleep in his chair and the owner of the restaurant came out of the kitchen to hang the CLOSED sign conspicuously on the front door. “It’s meant to be.”

  Fitz was drunk. He’d been drunk when she got back with the groceries four hours ago and he was drunk now. She was floating herself, not just on the beer and the gin and tonics, but also on the lighter-than-air euphoria of escape, the possibility of getting out from under all this burden she’d been bearing like a mule and starting a new life where she belonged, with the best and truest friends she’d ever known—her brothers and sisters—and in a place that would be like a permanent Mexico, Mexico transposed to the U.S.A., where nobody could be deported, ever. Fitz said, “I don’t know,” which was better than no, which was what she was afraid he was going to say.

  The fact was, Harvard was dead for them now—Ken had emphasized that. The department had disavowed the Psilocybin Project and anybody associated with it or any other form of psychedelic research. They’d fired Dick, ostensibly because he’d given the drug to an undergraduate when he’d sworn that only grad students would be involved, but that was only the proximate cause—they’d got rid of him because he was associated with Tim and Tim was an embarrassment not only to the department but the university as a whole. The upshot was that if you wanted to complete your degree, you’d better toe the line, and if your thesis was in any way related to psychedelic research, you were out of luck. And, of course, all the projects of the inner circle fell into that category, including Fitz’s. Under first Tim, then Dick, he’d been developing a research project along the lines of Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday experiment, substituting music students for divinity students and the concert hall for the chapel, the thesis being that the drug would facilitate creativity, opening them up to what down through the centuries had been called divine inspiration, with or without the face of God.

  “You can work on a new thesis idea there, anything, some Skinnerian animal-in-a-box kind of thing, who cares—just to get the degree. Then you can go on and do any kind of research you want. And at Millbrook, you’ll have both Tim and Dick there to guide you, like it was the best university in the world.”

  “They piss on Skinner.”

  “So somebody else, then—the point is, this is a chance to get them all off your back, start afresh, finish this thing, Fitz, once and for all. Don’t you see?” She was sitting on the edge of the bed, removing her flats and stockings. Fitz was slumped in the chair. Corey, lightly snoring, lay facedown on the cot in the corner, an orange smear of pizza grease decorating the flange of his nose.

  “What are we going to do for money?”

  “It’s rent free, you heard Ken. So that takes care of our biggest expense right there.”

  It was almost too good to be true: an entire estate, 2,500 acres, with ponds and fields and a turn-of-the-century mansion, and it was being given to Tim by Peggy’s twin brothers, Tommy and Billy, who lived in another house on the property, for the sum of one dollar a year. And why? For the purpose of setting up the Castalia Foundation and conducting all the research he wanted without any academic constraints. “And I could work while you write your dissertation.”

  “Where? Poughkeepsie? Beacon?” Fitz’s voice was thick and phlegmy, caught somewhere deep in his throat. He’d been drinking more heavily than usual, drinking all summer, though he’d vowed he was never going to sink to that level again. Which was all the more reason to get him out of here—and herself too. They’d already put down a deposit on the apartment haunted by the old lady and her cats, but she’d see what she could do to get that back.

  “Sure,” she said. “Anywhere. Face it, Fitz, this is a dead end here. And think of Corey—the schools have got to be better there, a little town like that surrounded by all these big estates. Rich people. Money. And there’s a college there too, isn’t there?”

  Fitz said, “I don’t know,” and he wasn’t referring to the college (Bennett, two years, all girls, which he knew every bit as well as she did), but this radical notion that had been dropped in their laps just hours before by Ken Sensabaugh, Fanchon and Alice at a time when radical change was just what they needed to keep from rotting in their shoes like all the other living corpses traipsing around the streets of Boston.

  “It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

  “You sound like a used car dealer.”

  “It’s the exact same phrase you used on me, if I recall�
��about Mexico, the first time? Please, Fitz, please—we can all be together, don’t you see? It’ll be like Mexico all over again.”

  “Right,” he said, and his voice had thickened still more, “but without the tacos. Or what, iguanas? But shhhh!”—he lifted a finger to his lips—“don’t tell Corey.”

  She dropped her shoes to the floor, smoothed out the stockings and folded them over her forearm. He’d slept with Fanchon in Mexico, she was sure of that, and maybe Susannah too, though it didn’t mean anything, not when you were under the influence, not when you were having a session, because jealousy was ego-dependent, a kind of disease of it, and the whole purpose of the drug was to enable you to let go of the ego and live in the moment. She’d had Ken. And Charlie. And that was nothing. Just brothers and sisters, just . . . tripping.

  “I can still get the deposit back,” she said, and her voice was thickening too. “I’ll bet,” she said. “I’ll bet I can.”

  Someone flushed the toilet in the room next to theirs. There was the tattoo of pounding feet, the sigh of bedsprings.

  “You know what I want to do?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Sleep on it.”

  In the next moment he was gone, his breathing coming slow and easy till it settled into a soft rasp that played counterpoint to their sleeping son’s. She reached up and shut off the lamp behind her and for a long while she sat there in the chair, listening to the motel sink into the deep rhythms of the night. Sixty-four rooms. The Hotel Catalina had less than half that. And Ken said the big house—the Alte Haus, he called it—had a kitchen that in itself was bigger than their last apartment, with a walk-in refrigerator and an eight-burner range. The meals they could have, everybody together, the sessions, the clear skies, a lake for swimming in the summer and skating in the winter! How many fireplaces? How many floors? Sixty-four rooms. It was like a dream opening up to her one panel at a time, muted colors, movement, and then a vision of them all, Ken especially—especially Ken—gathered round a big stone fireplace while a raga played on the stereo and her mind drifted out to play along with it.