Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  When she looked up, he was at the stereo, his back to her. There was the static of the needle dropping, and then something soothing was playing through the speakers, something that wasn’t the Beatles, that wasn’t jazz, or not any jazz she’d ever heard—it was piano music, simple and unadorned, and it felt as if each note were a separate slow pulse matching itself to her own.

  “What is this?” she asked. “I love it.”

  “That’s Satie,” Alice said. “Isn’t it?”

  “The Gymnopédies.” Tim had turned back round now and when he did she saw that he had a cigarette in his hand—a marijuana cigarette, like the one Ken had handed her that morning. He crossed the room and sat between them on the couch, then made a show of lighting the cigarette, taking a deep drag and holding in the smoke before passing it to her.

  “But, Tim,” she said, grinning and taking it from him in the firm pinch of two fingers, the way she’d seen Ken and Charlie do it, “I thought you were against drugs—illegal drugs anyway. Or is this legal now?”

  “You bet it is. We’re on a space station, our very own space station. And we make the rules here, not the squares. Go on, indulge. It’s good stuff—good shit, as Charlie and all the other hepcats would say; Ginsberg, have you met Allen? No? I’ll introduce you; he’ll be here sooner or later—and while it’s not in a league with the true sacrament, it’ll do for tonight, don’t you think? Joanie? Alice?”

  She passed the cigarette to Alice, who laid her head back on the arm of the couch, closed her eyes and drew deeply on it. She stretched out her legs and crossed her feet and Joanie saw that she’d shucked her shoes, because who needed shoes? This was a slumber party, one long slumber party. Joanie pulled up first one knee, then the other, and dropped her own shoes to the carpet, one thump, two thumps.

  “And you know something else?” he went on, his voice coming from somewhere far off, as if he were a late-night disc jockey on the jazz station out of New York. “It’s got the same aphrodisiac qualities LSD has”—and here he casually laid a hand in her lap and they both took a moment to study it there in a way that was both intimate and unbiased at the same time. “Though, of course, not as intense, but what I’m thinking is we don’t really want to have a session at this hour . . .”

  He trailed off. The piano music fell like a blizzard of soft warm feathers all around her. She looked into his eyes and smiled and he added, “Do we?”

  5.

  Things unfolded in a slow sure way, people dividing up the household tasks with perfect equanimity, everybody contributing for groceries according to their means, and no friction—or even the suggestion of it—over whether a family of five (the Eggerses) should put in more than a single couple like Charlie and Alice. She was going to have to get a job sooner or later, she knew that, but during that first month, as fall settled in and the trees turned color and the group sessions deepened their attachment to one another till they were like a single organism connected everywhere and at once by tendrils of perception and emotion and the deepest level of transpersonative harmony she’d ever known, she hardly gave it a thought. They had enough to get by—she’d recovered the deposit on the apartment and still had fifty dollars left out of her father’s check. And they had their savings, or what was left of them. Of course, the biggest factor by far was rent—or the lack of it. Without the burden of rent, she felt solvent for the first time in her life, the roof over their heads no more a worry than the air they breathed.

  She even made a joke of it one night, laying two dimes on the tabletop in front of Tim as they were sitting down to dinner. Everyone was there, making small talk, and Dick and Fanchon, who’d collaborated on a pot-au-feu, accompanied by a Caesar salad, fresh-baked bread and a selection of cheeses, had just set the serving dishes on the table. Tim made a show of examining the coins in the palm of his hand, slapped them back down and shot a glance around the table to be sure everyone was watching, and asked, “What’s this for?”

  “Rent.”

  “Rent? But we don’t—”

  Charlie cut in: “We don’t pay no stinking rent.”

  All eyes were on her now, even the kids’. “Oh, really?” she said, bringing a hand to her mouth as if in surprise. “My understanding was that our bloodsucking landlords are demanding a whole dollar a year, isn’t that right?”

  Fitz was cracking up. Fanchon tittered.

  “Well, if that’s the case, then this is our share—for the three of us, that is, which comes out to fifteen cents.” She slid the two dimes across the table to him. “You owe me a nickel.”

  Not to be outdone, Tim said, “I’ll flip you for it.”

  “Sure,” she said, “that’s only fair,” called heads and lost.

  Tim held up the coins so everyone could see them, then shifted one hip and slipped them into his pocket, poker-faced.

  “There,” she said, “now we’re even, right?”

  And he said, “Till next year anyway.”

  After dinner most evenings they retired to the library or the big sitting room, the fire snapping and crackling merrily away while they played cards and board games, read poetry or Hesse aloud or listened as one of the men read from whatever paper or book he was working on, including Fitz, who had a beautiful speaking voice, his cadences so measured it was as if he were singing. Sometimes the children took part, but most often they went off on their own. They had homework to occupy them, of course, and one or the other of the adults would make an effort to supervise them and offer up help where they could. On weekends, the kids tended to drift down to the village to horse around, kick a ball in the park or sit giggling in a booth at the diner over egg creams or sundaes, and that was fine, utterly harmless, because Millbrook was as safe a town as any in the country. And while the kids were off exerting their independence and entertaining themselves and their school friends, the adults participated in regular Saturday night sessions, experimenting with mood and ambience, but always secure, no matter how rugged a given portion of a given trip might be, in the setting. Nobody had to drive home. Nobody had to deliver himself up to the external world. And nobody had to confront his demons alone.

  Was it an idyll? Was she happy? Did she love Fitz even more because of the experience of Ken and Tim and Charlie and her sisterhood with the other women? Did she live in the moment as she never had before? Her days, from breakfast at seven and ushering the kids off to school to taking a morning walk around the lake and making her way through the household chores—gladly, gladly—were consecrated to experience. She’d never seen nature the way she saw it now, never before opened up to it like Thoreau or Siddhartha or the gurus Dick was always quoting, and she filled her days with it, ambling through the fields, hiking, rowing, meditating, watching the sun rise high to saturate the lake with its transformative power before peeling off her clothes and plunging into the water that was pure enough and cold enough to take the breath out of her. So yes, it was an idyll. And yes, she was happier than ever before. And yes, yes, yes, she loved Fitz all the more and Ken, Tim and Charlie too, her erotic life a dream of the flesh and the mind both.

  Of course, by its very definition, an idyll can’t last, and the first crack in the facade came the week before Halloween. Everyone was in a state of high excitement, from Bobby Eggers, their resident third grader, to the teenagers and the adults, especially Tim, the eldest among them and always the most enthusiastic no matter the program, whether it was a group session or a birthday party or a game of touch football on the lawn. This would be their first holiday together, a pagan holiday—and what could be better, more appropriate, more trippy, than that? Tim was planning a party for a hundred guests or more, Peggy and her set coming up from the city, along with Maynard and Flo Ferguson and Tommy and Billy and some of their friends too. She threw herself into the preparations, putting up decorations, sewing costumes, carving jack-o’-lanterns, running to the grocery and liquor store in the station wagon with Fanchon, Paulette, Alice and Susannah while the men split wood or sequ
estered themselves in their rooms with their books and papers and eternally clacking typewriters. She was distracted, that was it, living her own life in her own way for a change, and in retrospect she realized she could have—should have—paid a little more attention to Corey.

  She went into his room one night on some trivial errand—underwear, did he have clean underwear for school?—only to find his bed empty. The sheets and blankets were mussed, but that didn’t mean anything, since he never made his bed anyway and there was no maid service here, unlike at the Hotel Catalina. She checked her watch. It was past one in the morning—and on a school night, no less. Where could he be? Her first thought was that he must have fallen asleep in one of the other boys’ rooms, most likely Richard’s, because Richard was the one he was closest to. She went out into the hallway, then down the stairs to the first floor and along the corridor to the back of the south wing of the house, where the Robertses had their rooms, but no one was stirring, so she decided to try Tommy Eggers on the off chance Corey was there.

  Royce and Susannah were also on the first floor but on the other side of the house, and they’d taken three rooms together, one for themselves, one for Nancy and another for Tommy and Bobby. Everybody shared and shared alike and they were all one, yes, of course, but there were privacy concerns too, especially with regard to the children’s rooms, and she didn’t really want to intrude, but after backing up to make a quick search of the public rooms (Dick and Alice were sitting before the fire in the library playing chess, and when she asked they said they hadn’t seen Corey since dinner), she felt she had no choice.

  Going down the lower hallway in a silence that was broken only by the soft frictive shuffle of her own bare feet, she kept picturing the worst—he’d got lost in the woods, drowned in the lake, locked himself in the walk-in fridge—while reassuring herself that there had to be some obvious explanation. It was a big house. He could be anywhere. He did tend to nod off wherever he was—and he’d been doing it since he was a child, one minute adamantly insisting he wasn’t tired and had to watch just one more show on the television, please, please, please, and the next passed out at the kitchen table or in the depths of one of the armchairs. She saw movement at the end of the hall and caught herself till she realized it was a cat, one of the three cats currently inhabiting the place, the vanguard of countless cats—and dogs and a single monkey that had the destructive power of a whole troop—to come. The cat froze in mid-stride, one paw lifted delicately as if to put it down would cause the floor to detonate. It regarded her steadily a moment, then dropped the paw and vanished into the shadows.

  It was then that she thought she heard music playing, very faintly—so faintly she had to hold her breath to be sure, but yes, somebody’s stereo was going. She stood there a moment, listening, until she realized what it was—the Beatles, Charlie’s group, their voices reduced to a squeak and the guitars lowered to an insectoid whine, only the insistent drum clearly audible—and that it seemed to be coming from one of the Eggerses’ rooms. Which was strange, unless Charlie was with Royce and Susannah, turning them on to this new musical wonder—or, which was more likely, he’d loaned it to one of the kids, because really, no matter what Charlie might say, this was the most juvenile music she could imagine. When she got closer, she realized the sound was coming not from Royce and Susannah’s room, but from Nancy’s, which was two doors up from theirs.

  She felt odd standing there, like some sort of spy—or what, music critic? What did it matter to her what sort of music Nancy or any of the other kids listened to? Suddenly, she felt a wave of exhaustion roll over her. She’d put in a long day and she’d have to be up in five and a half hours to fix the kids’ breakfast, the whole mob of them, because the three mothers were rotating breakfast duties and tomorrow was her day on. She wanted to just turn around and go back up to bed—Corey was fine, she was sure of it, and it was time she stopped fussing over him; if he’d fallen asleep somewhere, even in one of the spare rooms, what difference did it make? Still, she was there, and in the next moment she moved to Tommy’s door and eased it open. It was dark, darker inside than in the hallway, which was lit by a single lamp on a table at the far end, but after a moment—a moment in which the cat, or another just like it, slipped between her legs and into the depths of the room—she could make out the sleeping forms of Tommy and Bobby in their twin beds and saw that there was no one else there, no one stretched out on the floor or slumped over in the armchair. She pulled the door closed, but then thought better of it and left it open a crack for the convenience of the cat.

  The Beatles. Love me do, they sang in a buzz of tiny chirping voices. She couldn’t explain what she did next because it wasn’t right and it wasn’t like her to snoop, but on an impulse, she checked Nancy’s door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. Very gently, wincing against the faintest protest of the hinges, she cracked open the door and peered inside. What she saw were four walls decorated with drawings and art posters, a bed, an armchair and a night table with a record player on it, the whole illuminated by a single night-light in the far corner. There were two heads buried in the pillow, the heads of two children—adolescents—and both of them were asleep. The record ended in a scratch of static, then there was the clunk of the mechanical arm cueing it up again—and again, once again and endlessly, the Beatles were singing. Love, love me do.

  You just can’t behave like that,” she told Corey when he got home from school the next afternoon. She’d been stewing about it all night and all day, angry, disappointed and fearful at the same time. He was too young for this. And so was Nancy. Fifteen was the age for first crushes, Valentine’s Day cards and school dances, not a full-blown sexual relationship, if that was what this was—and, really, what else could it be? She’d fought down the impulse to stalk into the room and shake them both awake because that would only have made matters worse. Unnerved, she’d eased the door shut and retreated down the hall in confusion. She hadn’t told anyone yet, not even Fitz—or Susannah, who really should rein in her daughter before something happened that was beyond the power of any of them to repair. Nancy. Nancy, with her eyeliner and lipstick—she was the one who should have known better.

  “Behave like what? What’re you talking about?”

  She’d taken him aside the minute he burst through the back door and into the kitchen along with Jackie, Tommy and the twins, all of them flushed from the walk home in the chill breeze that was coming down out of the north to put an abrupt end to the Indian summer everybody’d been enjoying practically that whole first month. They’d been tossing a football around, roughhousing, and they were in high spirits, cuffing each other in the meat of the arm and throwing taunts and quips back and forth till the kitchen, big as it was, seemed too small for them. She told him she wanted to speak with him privately—Right now, and don’t give me that look—and then she’d led him up the stairs and down the hall to her room, where he casually tossed his book bag on the bed and fell into the chair by the window as if he’d lost the use of his limbs. His face gave away nothing.

  She looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time in weeks. He had her coloring, dark eyes and hair and not a trace of Fitz’s carrot top, and he was growing so fast she saw he’d be needing new pants soon—and she’d just gone out and bought him the current pair not three months ago, at her mother’s. His nails were dirty. His hair needed cutting. There was a crusted-over cut just below his left ear.

  “I’m talking about Nancy.”

  She could see he was making an effort to keep his eyes on hers, holding his stare to maintain the pretense that he had nothing to hide. “What about her?”

  “Last night,” she said, and she was making an effort too, trying to keep her voice even, “you weren’t in your room. I checked. It was one-thirty and I was worried, wondering where you were—”

  “We were listening to records.”

  “You were in bed with her.”

  “What are you, spying on me?”


  “I was worried,” she repeated. She could hear the blood whispering in her ears, a sound like the wind rushing across a barren plain. “And I heard the music, so I pushed open the door a crack and there you were, in bed with her. I don’t know if you realize how wrong that is at your age, I mean, what the consequences can be—”

  “Consequences of what—listening to records? Records are bad for you now?”

  “Don’t get wise with me. You know what I’m talking about.”

  His face hardened. “No, I don’t—why don’t you explain it to me?”

  She and Fitz had always been open with their son and they’d both sat him down when he turned eleven for the facts-of-life discussion—You can ask me anything, she told him, anything, because sex, human sexuality, is nothing to be ashamed of—and she’d thought that was that, the learning process initiated and all the rest to follow in its wake, adolescence, college, dating, marriage. Now she said, “Do you know anything about birth control—I mean, the first thing?”

  He didn’t answer.

  The breeze, the autumn breeze that had a foretaste of winter on it, rattled the windows and she could feel the draft on her legs, which meant the house was going to be like a refrigerator come December. “You’re too young for this,” she said. “It’s not just sex and the dangers of—well, you do know how girls get pregnant, don’t you?—but the emotions involved, the hormones you can’t even imagine making all these changes to your body. And your mind too. Ask your father. He knows. He’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me what? You do it. You do it all the time. I saw you—” He’d pushed himself up now so that he was on the edge of the chair, poised there over his coiled legs, challenging her.