by T. C. Boyle
Tim, gesturing with his glass, reassured them. “Nothing’s permanent. Just pick whatever rooms strike your fancy, okay? If you don’t like them, we’ll switch them up, no problem. I want you all to be happy.”
They were on the second floor, the windows pregnant with rain, everybody milling around as if they were on a museum tour—and in a sense they were, because that was what this was, a museum, though in this case it was one you could live in. The kids—Corey, the Roberts twins and the Eggers trio—had vanished the minute they’d come in the front door, off on their own more visceral tour under the auspices of Suzie and Jackie, who’d been here a week already and knew the odd corners and adolescent enticements of the house in the way no adult ever could.
“Is everybody happy?” Tim asked.
“Happy?” Ken echoed. “We’re ecstatic.” And here he looked to Fanchon. “Right, kitten?”
“It is awestruck,” she said, and then corrected herself, “awesome. Times ten the size of Dick’s house—and Homer Street? Not even the same page.”
“Three cheers for Tim!” Rick Roberts cried, raising his glass, and they all joined in till they trailed off in laughter, delighted with themselves. They couldn’t believe their luck, couldn’t believe all this was theirs. Alice was crying, actually crying, with joy. Charlie’s glasses flashed. Tim grinned his grin. Fitz turned and gave her a hug. It was a moment, maybe the moment all her life had been building toward.
They weren’t the idle rich or the working rich or any kind of rich at all. They were students and student wives. They were used to cramped quarters and scrounging for rent and never having quite enough of anything. And here they were, gathered on the second floor of a mansion to end all mansions—and it was theirs for the duration, or however long it was going to be, brothers and sisters alike. And for now she really didn’t want to think beyond that. She put the glass to her lips, inhaled the fragrance of gin, and took a small slow sip of her drink as if she had all the time in the world.
Even after they’d been led up and down the hallways and peered into every one of the sixty-four rooms and admired the views from both towers, Tim still wouldn’t let anyone even think about unpacking. No, it was dinnertime, and Dick had spent the better part of the afternoon in the enormous kitchen, preparing one of his nonpareil marinara sauces, with meatballs and real Italian sausage from the deli in Poughkeepsie and enough vermicelli to feed the entire county. They had wine to drink, stories to tell, the moment to celebrate, and all these trivial details—choosing a room, lugging in suitcases, fretting over school registration and the next trip to the store for deodorant, toothpaste and shampoo—were nothing to worry over now. “Things’ll sort themselves out,” he said, as high on the moment as she’d ever seen him—and maybe high on something else too. “They always do, don’t they?”
Dinner was served in the formal dining room and they all pitched in to set the table for twenty, which seemed to her the perfect number—twelve adults, eight children, the adults at one end of the table, the children at the other, but for Dick, who insisted on sitting with the children. Tim had music playing—the first thing he’d done on moving in was to set up the stereo, wired to play in several rooms at once, because, as he said, there could be no life without music. She recognized the first album—Miles Davis’s Someday My Prince Will Come, their copy of which Fitz had played so many times it sounded as if an aerial bombardment were going on over the quieter parts—but then he put something on she didn’t recognize, a flute rising up over a deep well of bass and piano till it felt as if a bird on very light wings was soaring round the room. Which was nice. Very nice. She was feeling pleasantly inebriated, what with the cocktails and the Chianti Dick had served with dinner, and she settled in, Fitz on one side, Tim on the other, and just let herself drift.
“Group mind,” Tim was saying, addressing the table, “that’s what we’re going to get into here—and Mexico was just a foretaste of it. You remember Dick’s toe?”
She did—and she had to smile at the memory. It was in Mexico, back in early June, shortly after they’d got there, and everyone was gathered round on the patio one evening, just as they were gathered now, when Dick, coming up the steps from the pool, let out a sharp cry, followed by a volley of curses. He’d inadvertently stepped on a scorpion and the scorpion had stung him in retaliation. In the next moment, here came Dick, hopping on one foot and cursing still, till she and Paulette rushed to him and each took an arm to support him so he could limp into the torchlight and sit heavily in the midst of them. It might have been comical, a Laurel and Hardy moment, except that his toe, red as a cherry pepper, had already begun to swell and somebody—Royce—said that of over two hundred species of scorpions in Mexico, only the Centruroides are really dangerous, and she asked, “Well, what does that mean?” and he said, “They’re not going to kill you, most likely, but they do deliver a neurotoxin that can cause convulsions—and a serious inflammation of the pancreas, which is no joke. He really should have a doctor.” And then, to Dick: “Did you get a look at it? Was it a pale brownish color?”
“You kidding me?” Dick said, clenching his teeth against the pain. “I barely saw the thing.”
Somebody went for ice and a bar towel to use for a tourniquet and Corey and Tommy Eggers got a flashlight from the desk and went looking for the thing, as if it could possibly matter. Susannah telephoned for the doctor, but the doctor was off somewhere delivering a baby, and in the end they all just sat around watching Dick’s face and the bright swollen afflicted toe till Tim said, “Why not just close our eyes—all of us—and think it away? Focus, people, just focus. On Dick’s toe and on dissolving the negativity this little—what is it?, arachnid—has brought into our circle. Think healing thoughts, radiate outward, we are all one, Om.”
By the time they went to bed, Dick was up and about—nearly paralyzed with tequila, maybe, and walking with a limp, but the crisis had passed, and when the doctor finally did come the next morning, Dick just waved him away.
“That’s what we’re capable of,” Tim said. “And if we could do it then, in Mexico, with all those nasty little black shirts breathing down our necks, think what we can accomplish here—”
The mention of it made her breath come quick because she was sure he was going to propose a group session for tonight, their first night under the same roof, though of course that would hardly be practical since it was already getting late and they were barely settled yet. Earlier, during a break in the rain—and over Tim’s protestations that they were spoiling the mood—Fitz and Corey had brought most of their things up to the adjoining rooms they’d settled on (in the north tower, second floor, looking down on the big rolling expanse of lawn that was the sea surrounding their island). She’d hardly had a chance to hang their clothes in the closets before Dick was banging the dinner gong, and what little time she did have she’d spent wrangling with Corey, who wanted to set up a kids-only room on the third floor—which was absolutely not going to happen because she could see that quickly devolving into a Lord of the Flies scenario, and Fitz had stepped in to back her up. “So what’s the point, then? Corey had demanded. “I mean, it’s just a joke. Group mind for the adults, and what—no mind for the kids?” And she’d said, “The point is we’re your parents, okay? And you’ll sleep where you’re told.”
Now, before she could turn to Tim and put the question to him—“When’s our first group session going to be?”—Paulette called out sharply down the table to where the kids had somehow managed to substitute Coca-Cola for the milk everyone agreed they needed to drink first, for their bones and teeth and all the rest, nutrition, protein, vitamin D. “Richard,” she snapped, “Ronald—you know better than that. All of you, all you kids—”
But the kids didn’t say anything, either in accord or rebuttal. The milk—eight full glasses of it—sat untouched before their eight plates while the Coke bottles rotated from the table to their lips and back again. This was their celebration too. And it had been toug
h on them, being uprooted first from Mexico and then from their schools and apartments in Boston and Cambridge. The youngest, Bobby Eggers, who’d just turned eight, sat there blinking at her as if he were riding a balloon somewhere over the mountains and she’d just let the air out of it.
“Come on now. I’m warning you.” Paulette clapped her hands sharply while the conversation died around her and everyone looked down the table to where Bobby, at least, picked up his milk glass and made a show of taking a swallow from it. “I’m not kidding—Nancy, boys, set an example, won’t you?”
Susannah Eggers, who’d been tipping farther and farther back in her chair, plainly exhausted, came to life at the sound of her daughter’s name. She righted the chair, snapped, “Nancy, behave yourself!” and gave the child a withering look, though she didn’t seem to know what the fuss was all about. It was a general admonition though and all the children seemed to absorb it, even as Dick raised his glass high and cried, “Let them eat cake!” and the children, one by one, drained their glasses and began to slink off, whether to bed or some unscripted adventure that had nothing to do with unpacking or worrying over what to wear for the first day at their new school or even getting sufficient sleep, Joanie couldn’t say. Or even imagine. She was occupied with her own drama, which at the moment involved Tim, who certainly wasn’t going to let the festivities die, was he?
Eventually, as people got up to clear away the dishes—“I’ll wash them in the morning,” she heard herself offer—and Tim passed around snifters and a decanter of cognac, things settled into a familiar pattern, some drifting off, some staying on to extend the evening. The record changed and changed again. At some point Charlie put on a record by an English pop group called the Beatles that was a jangle of guitars and heavy obvious drumbeats and Tim, in the middle of a story about an animal he swore was a wolf loping across the face of one of the hills out back (“This place is wild, I’m telling you”), looked up with a pained expression and said, “Jesus, take that racket off, will you, Charlie?” and Fitz seconded him.
“Just listen,” Charlie said, ignoring them both. “Because what you’re hearing is the sound of the future. Hear it? Hear those harmonies? Tell me that’s not catchy—”
“Give me jazz or give me death,” Fitz said, draining his snifter and looking as if he were about to fling it against the wall. He was tired, she could see that. And drunk.
But the Beatles went on, singing about love, and Charlie danced around the room, snapping his fingers and mugging like a lounge singer. “Dig it,” he said, leaning into Tim and mouthing the simplistic words—“Love, love me do”—and making a general ass of himself. “This is only available in England now—remember Pete Meister, my amigo who runs the print shop in Cambridge? He brought it back with him over the summer, so you are listening to the rarest of the rare. And mark my words—this is going to blow the lid off everything.”
The Beatles—she would come to love them, but not yet, not now—drove everybody from the room except her, Fitz, Tim and Alice, and after ten minutes of them, Fitz pushed himself up from the table, hollered over the music so Charlie could hear him—“I hope they stay in England and die a quick death!”—and then hovered at her side a moment before saying, “I’m beat. I’m going up to bed. You coming?”
She really didn’t feel like moving. She was too content, the music notwithstanding. “Give me a minute,” she said, holding up the snifter in evidence. “Just till I finish this.” Fitz’s eyes were bloodshot. He wavered a bit, his eyes blunted in the candlelight. Then he shrugged and went off to find their bed in their new room in the house that was as big as the world.
When both sides of the album had played, Charlie went to the stereo, put on side one again and came dancing back across the room, snapping his fingers and rotating his hips. He tried to persuade Alice to get up and dance with him, but she just gave him a numb smile and stared right through him. Then he came to her and she pointed to her brandy glass and said, “This dance is already taken.” Tim laughed. Then he raised his eyebrows and shot his eyes to heaven, and that was funny, so she laughed along with him. It was almost as if he were putting on a performance for her, Tim the academic, connoisseur of Bach, Mozart and Chopin, devotee of modern jazz, and here he was on their first night of living together tolerating this nadir of low culture in the service of group harmony, mutual support—and yes, as the Beatles so persistently had it—love.
“Listen,” he said, and he leaned into her and cupped his hand to her ear to be heard over the music, “I know when I’m beat: let’s abandon the field to the Beatles.”
She pulled back from him to look him in the face, then shrugged and smiled. “Yeah,” she said, “good idea,” mouthing the words because she knew he wouldn’t hear her with his bad ear—he had trouble hearing when there was ambient noise, and this was as ambient as noise got.
Then they were rising from the table and he was bending over Alice with the same offer of rescue and the two of them followed Tim out of the room, across the hall and up the stairs to the second floor while Charlie danced and throbbed in the dining room and the Beatles screamed out their love. “I’ve got a stereo up in my room,” Tim called over his shoulder, “and it’s pretty good quality, you’ll be surprised.”
She and Alice mounted the steps side by side behind him and she focused on the heels of his white tennis sneakers, which were as spotless as if they’d just come out of the box, one foot rising, then the next, tennis sneakers that were like tennis balls bouncing up the stairs instead of down, and she realized she was drunk—or exhausted. Or some combination of the two. It had been quite a day. Still, tired though she was, she wasn’t ready for bed yet—she was too exhilarated, too full of the present and the future even to think about shutting her eyes.
“How you feeling, Alice?” she asked, putting a hand on her arm as much to steady herself as draw her attention. Was she woozy? No. She’d had—how many drinks? Two martinis, wasn’t it? The wine with dinner, then the cognac. But what about the marijuana cigarette? a voice inside her asked and then immediately answered itself, But that was hours ago, miles ago, all the way back in Boston, which didn’t even seem possible. Had she really gone from Boston—from the seedy discount motel in Waltham, actually—all the way here in a single day? It was too much, like going from one planet to another.
Alice—her face was a marvel, the smoothest unbroken complexion, the high forehead and thick-lashed eyes—just smiled and said, “Great. Never better.”
Tim had the best rooms of all, a suite really, that looked out on the front garden and the fountain that had receded into darkness hours ago. He’d pushed his desk up against the window of the main room and there was a typewriter there and his books and papers were scattered about as if he’d jumped up from his desk in medias res when they’d come rumbling up the driveway. There was a couch, a pair of armchairs and an Oriental rug that took up half the room and a king-size bed in the adjoining room, the double doors to which were flung open.
“Sit down, make yourselves comfortable,” he said, gesturing to the couch. “After all, every space here is everybody’s space, because we’ve got to get over this possessiveness game, mine, mine, mine all the time. Spread your wings, ladies, put your feet up. As they say in Mexico, ‘Mi casa es tu casa.’”
They both settled into the couch and Alice said, “I can’t believe this place, I just can’t. I mean, I feel so lucky.”
He had the cognac decanter in his hand still, another magic trick, and he produced three snifters and poured them each a drink. “I know what you mean,” he said. “And if you think you’re lucky, just look at me—hounded out of Harvard and Mexico and I—we—end up here? Is this the best of all possible worlds, or what?”
It was, and it was thanks to Peggy, but Peggy wasn’t here. She was in Manhattan, where her apartment was, dining out, going to nightclubs, living her glamorous life among the other heiresses and jet-setters and all the rest of the people to whom money meant nothing. She
wouldn’t be here till the weekend or maybe the weekend after that, Tim wasn’t sure. And Tim wasn’t one to worry over it either—if Peggy didn’t show up, someone else would. That was the way he operated, the ultimate bachelor, but his attachments and flirtations and his magnetism for women were all a cover for the guilt he felt over the suicide of his first wife—that much was as plain as day. And you didn’t have to be a psychologist to see it either.
The way she heard it, from Ken and Fanchon both and what Fitz was able to piece together, Tim, no surprise, had been anything but monogamous when he’d been at Berkeley, drifting away from his first wife—Marianne—to be with the woman he was then having an affair with (and who would ultimately become his second wife, but that marriage didn’t last either). It all came to a head on the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, when he and Marianne came back from a party, drunk, and the other woman showed up at the house. There was a fight. The other woman left. And Tim and Marianne, drinking still, drinking more, passed out in bed together. When Tim woke the next morning, Marianne was gone. Sometime in the night she’d got up and baked him a cake for his birthday, which she’d left in the middle of the kitchen table before going out to the garage, starting up the car and letting it run till the fumes asphyxiated her. Ken said that in the moment of discovery, when Tim, panicked, flung open the garage door, both Suzie and Jackie—eight and six at the time—had seen their mother lying there across the front seat of the car in her nightie, as if she were sleeping out, as if she were having fun, but that detail was too much to hold on to and Joanie let go of it. She had to. It would have crushed her to believe it. Would have crushed anybody, of course it would, and what had it done to Tim?
