Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

The music (no Beatles, though that was what Corey would have wanted or would have thought he wanted) segued from the brittle tinkling of the MJQ to Ravi Shankar, master of the extended raga that beat on in your brain till your brain was all the way across the world in India, perched high on a palanquin on the back of an elephant framed against the white peaks of the Himalayas. Which was a funny image—a brain riding an elephant—and she had to step back from herself a moment and give out with a little laugh that no one seemed to notice, and just as well. They were tripping, or soon would be, and she wasn’t. What she was doing was sipping her second martini and watching the kids furtively from her perch on the couch alongside Fitz, Ken and Fanchon, already beginning to regret her resolution.

  But the kids. They were in another world now, intense, expectant, their faces just beginning to register what was happening inside them, the relentless beat drawing them in degree by degree, Richard tapping his foot, Ronald drumming on one knee, Nancy suddenly up on her knees and drawing circles in the air with both hands as her mind rushed off to explain something her tongue couldn’t keep up with. And Corey. He wasn’t musically inclined, not as far as she could see, and he’d told her and Fitz more than once that jazz was boring and that you could take the boredom to the third power with Indian music, but he was beginning to nod his head in time to the beat, if ever so marginally. Richard—his hair grown out and worked up into a pompadour since school began—said something that got them all laughing and then Corey said something and Nancy took it up and they kept on laughing till they were rolling on the floor in sheer abandon and then sitting up to clap along with the music and laugh some more. They were opening up, even Ronald, the quiet one, and she could see the excitement in their eyes.

  For a while, an hour so in, Lori and Nancy got up and started dancing in place, doing a kind of modified Twist they tried to time to the skittering beat, but none of the boys would join in and after ten or fifteen minutes of gyrating their hips and pumping their arms like cheerleaders they gave it up and sank back down to the floor. Where it felt safer. Closer. Solider. Where they could fold their legs under them and give themselves up to the all-embracing force of gravity that would hold them in place so their minds could roam free. And so what if Nancy took hold of Corey’s hand and intertwined her fingers with his and held on to him as if she owned him, as if they were ten years older and married and stretched out on their own bed in their own house somewhere in a future existence neither of them could begin to fathom? So what if every day of her life she regretted getting pregnant at nineteen and missing out on college and was determined to spare Corey that sort of burden? It was all right. Nothing was going to happen between Nancy and Corey, not while she was here. (“Is she on birth control?” she’d asked Susannah the morning after she’d found them in bed together and Susannah had said, “Are you crazy? She’s fifteen,” and she’d said, “My point exactly.”)

  She was watching. Right here, watching. Sipping and nodding her head to the music and trying to sink into the mood of the room on the fumes of alcohol alone. Which wasn’t happening and wasn’t going to happen. Not as things stood. Fitz sat with her a while after Ken and Fanchon had gone into the library to commune with some of the others—the ones who were tripping instead of sitting there straight as arrows—and they both watched the kids, but the kids were quiet now, deep into their own minds, and really, it couldn’t have gone better, they both agreed on that. Still, she wasn’t satisfied, not in herself. And when she let her gaze fall over the room to see how tuned-in everybody was, she felt even less satisfied. She wanted to be there with them—with Corey, with Fanchon and Ken and everybody else—and it came to her that there was no good reason why she had to deprive herself aside from paranoia and her own ego that just wouldn’t let go even if she swilled a gallon of gin. So why not? she thought. Really, why not join the party?

  By this point, Fitz, who’d had too much to drink, was sunk into the couch, his chin pressed to his chest, snoring lightly. She didn’t consult him. She didn’t need to. Everything was as fine as fine could be. She got up and made her way across the room, dodging people laid out like corpses in the flickering shadows, nobody talking now and the only sound the airy repeated figures of Ravi Shankar’s sitar and the ceaseless tapping of the frenetic little drums.

  She found Tim in the far corner, stretched out on his back in a heap of pillows with Peggy beside him, her head resting on his shoulder and her hair so disordered it looked as if she’d been out in a windstorm. She had one hand inside Tim’s shirt, dreamily massaging his chest, her hand flexing and releasing over and over again. Tim’s eyes were closed, but he was seeing things, that was for sure: if everybody else had taken 250 mics, he would have done double that or even three times it, because he’d tripped more than all of them combined and needed larger and larger doses to get him where he wanted to go. Which, after two martinis that had had no effect on her whatsoever, was where she wanted to go too.

  “Tim,” she whispered, standing over him as the candles flickered and the music thumped and rattled on.

  His eyes flashed open, two dark gouges in the shadowy architecture of his face. He saw her, or seemed to see her, and smiled.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she said.

  He didn’t ask why or what had taken her so long or say yes or say no—he just said, “My right front pocket,” and in the next moment she was bending over him and slipping her hand into his pocket like a thief. Or a lover. She had been his lover and would be again, all in the family, but not tonight. Tonight—and here she shot a look around the room only to see that nobody was stirring, let alone watching her—she was going to shake one pill from the bottle . . . no, two. Why not two?

  7.

  Fall exploded in color and then left them, so that by the third week of November it already seemed like mid-winter, the trees stripped bare, the grass dead, the flowerbeds withered and the fountain transformed into an ice sculpture. The jack-o’-lanterns had long since collapsed on themselves and the dozen or so uncarved pumpkins on the front porch were frozen through till they were like so many cannonballs stockpiled against an invasion. Mice thrived in the house, legions of them appearing and disappearing like phantoms, and the cats, which could have earned their keep, just seemed bored by the whole spectacle. What else? The furnace burned fuel like a battleship at sea and it didn’t seem to make much difference, since the house was inhumanly cold in all its sixty-four rooms except in the kitchen and within ten feet of one of the fireplaces. The women shopped at the A & P, cooked, cleaned and took the sacrament one night a week. The men typed, read, split wood and took the sacrament with them, though some began to feel that the regimen was too confining. Why not two nights a week? Three? Why not (it was Charlie who proposed this, only half-jokingly) every day?

  For the children—the teenagers, the offspring—who’d passed their test with flying colors, it was to be once a month like an infusion of vitamins. Lori was the exception, though Lori wasn’t a child and wasn’t one of their offspring either. She was a presence, already becoming a fixture, serving as an intermediary between the other teenagers and the adults, and she pitched in with the housework and the cooking too, as did both the Nestlings once they came out of their haze. After a while, nobody asked her about school anymore or wondered what she was doing there among them or who exactly had invited her or why. She did seem to have money though (rich parents?) and she never failed to make a weekly contribution to the grocery pool, which was more than could be said for some—all the men, except Dick, were hurting, deprived of their salaries and stipends, and none of the women worked outside of the house. Something had to give. And so at the next meeting, when Tim and Dick revived the idea of conducting psychedelic seminars, just as they’d attempted to do in Zihuatanejo before the black shirts descended on them, what had once sounded so intrusive began to sound better, much better, salvatory even.

  “What are we going to charge?” Rick Roberts wanted to know.

  “Seventy-five
dollars apiece,” Tim said. “As a donation, a minimum donation. More if the spirit moves them.” He was at the head of the table, as usual, the dinner dishes cleared away, candles burning, wine and beer flowing, a pair of marijuana cigarettes—joints—making their slow way from hand to hand. He’d thought everything out. He was in charge, guru and impresario both, as capable as anybody of finding a way to profit from the inner life, and that was all that mattered now—they had to keep things going. They had to. And while Joanie hated the idea of strangers intruding on them—more strangers—what was the alternative?

  “We’ll start,” Dick was saying, “with maybe twenty couples—”

  “Which will net us a nice clean three thousand dollars,” Tim said, giving a glance round the table. “Which, I think you’ll all agree, is a nice weekend’s work, no?”

  She was stunned. Three thousand dollars. That would solve a lot of problems, one of which was that she hadn’t even begun to look for work yet, though their nest egg was just about gone and she was feeling increasingly guilty about it. Corey needed a new winter jacket. Needed boots. Christmas was coming up. Would she get a share? Would they all? Or maybe a salary—the Castalia Foundation could pay out salaries, couldn’t it?

  “What are we going to feed them?” Paulette wanted to know. She was slumped in her chair, glassy-eyed. She’d lost weight, which was evident from the way her sweater hung from her in long depleted folds. And her hair, which had lightened so prettily under the Mexican sun, seemed to have lost its sheen. She looked exhausted. Of all of them, she put in the most time in the kitchen, so it wasn’t just an idle question.

  “Same thing we eat,” Tim said, “only more of it.”

  “Much more,” Charlie said.

  “All that’s wonderful,” Susannah said, “but this isn’t a hotel. Who’s going to do all the cooking, clean the rooms—they’re going to expect clean rooms, aren’t they?”

  “We’ll all pitch in,” Dick said. “It’s worth it, isn’t it? I mean, three thousand dollars? And it’s not as if we don’t have all the names and addresses of the people who joined the IFIF and now the Foundation—all we have to do is send out letters and watch the money roll in.”

  “What about the heavenly blue?” Fitz asked. He was propped on both elbows, his cigarette fuming in the ashtray, his drink—brandy, more brandy—squared up right beside it as if he were sitting in a bar someplace. “We need it for ourselves, isn’t that right? For our own sessions? Isn’t that what this is all about?” He was irritated, the lines in his brow compressing like waves crashing one atop the other. He looked directly at Dick. “Unless you’re planning on buzzing up to Canada in your Cessna every other week.”

  “We’re going to do it without drugs,” Tim said.

  “Without drugs?” Charlie could barely contain himself. “How can you have a session without drugs? That’s like, like”—he snatched up the first thing that came to hand, Fitz’s drink—“brandy without a glass. Or, or—”

  “A pigeon without wings?” Tim said. “A Girl Scout without a uniform? An ocean without water?” He held up both palms for silence. “We are going to give them exactly what we promise: lectures, meditation, group mind. Just the way Gurdjieff’s people do it. Think of it as a retreat, a weekend in the country away from the madhouse of the city, leave your ego at the door, thank you very much. In fact, the first night, the way Dick and I see it, we dress everybody in robes so as to eliminate status symbols, and that goes for jewelry too, even watches—and we forbid them to talk, not a word, till the morning of the second day. Silence. A strict code of silence.”

  “Right,” Dick said. “No ‘I’m a stockbroker’ or ‘We live in Scarsdale’ or any of that nonsense.”

  “They’re going to want drugs,” Charlie said.

  Fanchon, silent to this point, said, “But of course. This is what we all want, is it not?”

  And Tim, serene, above it all, had every angle figured out: “They’re not going to get them. As Fitz points out, we’ve got our own supply to worry about—thanks, Dick, for all your efforts on our behalf, by the way, and don’t think we’re not supremely grateful—and the way the press is stirring things up, not to mention Lori’s dear old college prez, we don’t really need to attract any official attention here, do we?” He looked round the table. “We give them illusion, perfectly legal, non-controversial and totally habit forming.”

  “Hocus-pocus,” Charlie said, and everybody laughed.

  “Now you see it,” Tim said, pulling an imaginary card out of his sleeve, “now you don’t.”

  It was amazing what the promise of money could do. Everyone pitched in to clean the place up, which was long overdue, and because Tim felt the atmosphere was too staid—too bourgeois—they went around painting mandalas and third eyes on the walls and then sawed the legs off the furniture so as to reduce everything to floor level, Arabian Nights style. Or Japanese. (It was around that time they’d all piled into a couple of the cars and driven up to Bard for a showing of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which really took Tim’s fancy—“That’s the way to do it,” he said, “go minimal, sit right on the floor and all you need for a table is a block of wood. Right?” he said. “Right? Which, by the way, is also your pillow.”) She did her part and more, though she knew in her heart it was all wrong, that they were selling out, constructing some ersatz version of the life they’d chosen in a way that would be hard to shake off, as if the artificial were the real and the real the illusion. Still, it was better than going back to work at some shitty job, waitressing in a café or typing up index cards in some tomb of a library in Poughkeepsie or Newburgh.

  Then, just as they’d gotten focused, the bomb hit: in a single day, President Kennedy was assassinated and Aldous Huxley, their animating spirit, died. Huxley’s death wasn’t unexpected—he’d been ill with cancer for some time and Tim had recently flown out to Los Angeles to pay his last respects—but it was a blow nonetheless. With Kennedy, it was different. Nobody had expected that, least of all her—and she must have been one of the last people in the country to hear about it. She’d been out for a long ramble through the woods that afternoon and when she got back—late, the sky already beginning to close up—she was puzzled to find no one in the sitting room or the library, not even the dog or one of the cats. Puzzled, she sank into the couch in front of the fire, which had burned down to coals, something that was unusual in itself—there was always somebody around to throw a log on. One of the satisfactions of a house with a fireplace, as opposed to the chintzy apartments they’d been stuck in the past two years, was to build a fire and plant yourself in front of it to absorb the heat and watch the play of the flames that were a whole trip in themselves, whether you were high or not. She always liked to picture the primeval men and women—cavemen, Neanderthals—staring into their bonfires and leaving their bodies for hours at a time while the stars rained down on them and the wind howled and the mammoths and musk oxen and all the rest of the ice-bound creatures curled up in their fur.

  When she got up to fetch wood from the porch, still wondering where everybody was, she thought she heard a noise from the kitchen and stopped a moment, listening. There was a crackle, a whine, then a mechanical voice—the radio—and went to investigate. Pushing through the double doors, she was stunned to see everybody there, the entire household, right down to the Nestlings and little Bobby Eggers, crowded round the kitchen radio and sitting on every available surface, the counters, the table, the kitchen chairs, the chopping block. No one said a word, no one even glanced up at her. For one wild moment she thought she was in a Twilight Zone episode and everyone had been transformed into automatons, but then, her heart fluttering, she asked, “What is it? What’s happened?”—and Fitz looked up at her and said, “Kennedy’s dead.”

  “What do you mean dead?”

  Corey shot her a look. He had tears in his eyes.

  The announcer, in a lugubrious voice, was progressing through a slow drumbeat of detail, Dallas, 12:30 P.M. Central time
, motorcade, shots fired, which didn’t make sense at all. The president dead? But no, that couldn’t be—he’d been shot, that was all, and they’d just patch him up like in the westerns, where the heroes got shot all the time. Then somebody, one of the kids, said, “Turn on the TV,” which didn’t make any sense either. Nobody had a television here. They’d come to Millbrook for the inner life, not commercials for potato peelers and Oscar Mayer wieners. She looked wildly around her. “TV? What are you talking about?”

  In the next moment, everybody was filing out of the kitchen in solemn procession and heading down the corridor to Royce and Susannah’s room, where Royce was already bent over the rabbit ears of a big maple TV cabinet that must have been buried in the trailer they’d towed behind them when they left Boston and had sat there all these weeks awaiting just this moment. But it was on now, humming to life: a flicker, an adjustment of the dial, a new announcer, his voice shaken and hollow. Then the first image appeared, and it was devastating, the real world, the world of hate and pain and horror, slamming right into her like a clenched fist. She saw a casket being lowered from an airplane, and behind it, the president’s wife—Jackie—in her pastel suit, which was steeped in her husband’s blood, following numbly in its wake.

  No one said a word. She squeezed in beside Fitz, who was pressed up against the wall, one arm around Corey, and for the longest time she held on to them both, her eyes fixed on the screen and the figures moving there in shadowy procession. Jackie Kennedy, right? Lori had said. As a goof, right? All at once she was crying too. It was her fault. All her fault—if she’d only dressed as somebody else, a witch, a cabaret dancer, a sea hag, this would never have happened. It was karma, all karma, and she’d been wrong, she was deluded, and she was guilty, guilty, guilty, of this and everything else.

  She glanced round the room and saw that everybody was huddled in separate groups, husbands and wives and children together, Tim, Peggy, Suzie and Jackie, the Nestlings, the Robertses, the Eggerses, the Sensabaughs, as if everything to this point had just been playacting and once the world sank its talons into them, they were ready to give up the pretense. This was no family. This was just a collection of strangers united by one thing only and that thing was a drug, just a drug . . .