Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  That was when Tim crossed the room to the television—This is a tragic day for America, the announcer was intoning, for the whole—and flicked it off. “I guess this is as bad as it gets,” he said, bowing his head. “We’ve lost a president—and I’ve just learned that Aldous passed away this afternoon out in Los Angeles. Two gone in one day,” he said, shaking his head. “But what we’re going to do is hold a vigil, a candlelight vigil, for both their souls.” He nodded to Dick, who was standing in the corner beside Lori, stone-faced. “We’ll gather by the fire in ten minutes for meditation, and for those who want to commune with them, Dick will be passing round the sacrament.”

  People began pushing themselves up from the floor, patting down their pockets and looking around them absently as if they’d forgotten something. Still nobody said anything, not even the kids, not even Bobby.

  “By the way,” Tim went on, “if it will make any of you feel any better, Aldous at least went peacefully. Laura gave him two intramuscular injections of LSD-25 in his final hours, just as he’d requested when I last saw him. His body might have failed him, as all our bodies will fail in time, but his mind soared—and if we focus, really focus as a group, I don’t have the slightest doubt we’ll feel those emanations tonight.”

  He paused. The dog, which had been lying on the floor beside Jackie, got up and stretched himself, then gave his head and shoulders a good shake so that his collar rattled and chimed in a way that seemed to bring the whole room out of its trance. “And Kennedy’s too,” Tim added. “Maybe even Kennedy’s too.”

  They held the first of the consciousness-raising seminars three weeks later, which gave everyone a little breathing room after the national tragedy (and here Tim was thinking of the paying guests especially). Forty participants, mostly couples and mostly middle-aged, signed up and sent in their registration fees in advance. They began arriving on Friday afternoon in the face of a cold northerly wind and intermittent snow showers, and the first problem, which no one, incredibly, had anticipated, was where they were going to park. She was in the kitchen, working furiously over the dinner preparations—forty more mouths to feed, above and beyond the daily demands of the household—when Tommy Eggers burst in the back door, shouting, “They’re here! They’re here!”

  Susannah and Paulette were with her, tucking the roasts in the oven and putting the finishing touches to the relish trays, and at the moment she was bent over the biggest pot in the kitchen, mashing potatoes. “Who?” she asked, looking up irritably. The guests weren’t due till five—the instructions had been explicit on that score—and it was hardly past four yet.

  Tommy was tall, narrow shouldered, seventeen now—or was it eighteen?—and his coloring was nothing like his sister’s. He had her eyes, perfectly round and black as pitted olives, but his hair was a sort of neutral brown, whereas Nancy’s was so unrelievedly black you would have thought she was an Indian. Or a gypsy. He was nice enough, she supposed, a good kid, but no one would mistake him for a genius. “I don’t know,” he said, looking to his mother, then back to her again, “—the people, you know, the ones we’re like all supposed to hide from?”

  “You kids don’t have to hide,” Susannah said, but they did. Nobody wanted to pay seventy-five dollars and upward for a mystic retreat and see a sneering contingent of adolescents slinking around. The kids were to stay strictly to themselves, out of sight, out of earshot. Tim had ordained it so and Dick had set them up in the house out back called the Bowling Alley, which had plenty of room for all of them and, as its name indicated, sported its own bowling alley in the basement to help keep them entertained.

  Just then, a face appeared in the window over the kitchen table. She saw a man there, a stranger, mid-thirties, gray fedora, gray herringbone overcoat with the collar pulled up, white shirt, blue tie. He began rapping at the glass. Where, he mouthed, do we park?

  She gave him an abrupt wave, then turned to Tommy. “Can’t one of the men take care of it?”

  Tommy—he was already picking at the relish tray, folding a piece of bologna into his mouth—just shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody’s around.”

  “They can’t be here already,” Paulette said, all evidence to the contrary.

  “All right, all right,” she heard herself say. “I’ll do it.”

  She went to the door, where somebody’s jacket—one of the kids’?—was hanging on a hook there and she shrugged into it, all the while making conciliatory gestures to the man in the window, who seemed to be pressing his face to the glass now. She was just about to open the door when she realized that she’d have to talk to him, which would spoil the whole illusion, as if his seeing her there in the steamed-over kitchen mashing potatoes wasn’t demystifying enough, and so she held up her palm to stall him while she ran out the other door and through the dining room to the front hall, where she snatched up half a dozen sheets of the instructions she’d typed up and mimeographed herself. There was no one around. “Dick!” she shouted up the stairs. “Fitz!” No answer. So she hurried out the front door, thinking to cut round the side of the house.

  The day was blustery, stung with the cold. There were already three cars in the driveway, faces watching her expectantly from behind the silvered windows as she darted across the dead grass, the wind in her face, pellets of snow rattling off the jacket—which must have been Nancy’s, she realized, too tight at the waist and short in the sleeves—and came up to the man at the window, who swung round on her, startled, and said, “Sorry, I just wanted to know where we’re supposed to park?”

  She held a finger to her lips.

  He looked puzzled. “Is this the right place? This is where the seminar’s supposed to be, isn’t it?”

  She nodded and handed him one of the sheets of paper, which fluttered in the wind as he tried to make it out. What it said, under the heading Awareness was that silence would be required among the participants for the first twelve hours, as a way of breaking set and eliminating role-playing. And then—Tim had dictated this to her—it got more explicit: No one here is eager to play the game of “you” or the game of “guest” with you. There will be little interest manifested in your thoughts, opinions, accomplishments, nor in the history and complexity of your personality. You will find total acceptance but little verbal reassurance. “Good” is what raises the ecstasy count of all persons present and “bad” is what lowers the ecstasy count.

  The wind snatched away his breath. Hard dry pellets of snow batted at him, whitened the brim of his hat. He read as if it were a Herculean labor, the first test in a long string of them. Finally he looked up at her out of eyes the color of his hat and she realized he was good-looking, solidly built, handsome in the way of the detectives in the old films. And eager too, she could see that. He wanted enlightenment just as she did, just as they all did.

  “Right,” he said, handing her back the flyer, “but where do I park?”

  This was Tim’s show, Tim’s and Dick’s, and she was window dressing—and hostess, of course, that too. And waitress. And pot scrubber. And chambermaid. Tim told her to dress in white, as much as possible, even though it was winter, and to look good, look her best and give everybody a mysterious smile. “You’re good at that, Joanie—you’re a champ.” He was always doling out compliments, that was his way, that was his method, and the night they’d tripped together he’d told her she had the best figure of any woman—or girl—in the inner circle, Peggy included. And that from the minute he’d laid eyes on her, at that first session, that first night back in Newton, he’d wanted to trip with her. And fuck her. He’d wanted to fuck her—and what did she think about that? She’d thought nothing. She was tripping and smiling so hard she thought her face would split in six places and fall right off her. But he was Tim and Tim always got what he wanted.

  Now, after all the guests had been settled in their rooms and the slowly accumulating snow swept off the front and back porches, she was in the kitchen with Paulette and Susannah, putting the finish
ing touches to the meal. What they were doing—and the idea had been Michael Hollingshead’s—was doctoring the dishes with food coloring. The potatoes she’d mashed were a bright Saint Patrick’s Day green, the Chablis was black as coffee, the coffee pink and the meat glazed a bright banana yellow. Why? To disorient the senses, to make things seem what they weren’t and break set for all the hushed guests who might have been wealthy, might have been powers in their own right, but were dressed indistinguishably in white robes, stripped now of clothes and jewelry and any other identifying ornaments and sitting solemnly at the big table in the dining room where candles flickered and a projector threw rotating globs of color against the far wall, precursor of the light shows Tim would begin to employ on the lecture circuit.

  They’d been treated to an introductory lecture by Tim and Dick, in which they learned about meditation, transcendence, set and setting, the group mind and the importance of avoiding the imposition of their own jargon or experimental games on others. They would eat in silence, gather around the big fireplace in the sitting room for a meditation session led by Dick and then proceed by candlelight to their rooms. In the morning, after a breakfast featuring black milk, violet eggs and home fries the color of Christmas tree ornaments, they’d be allowed to converse with one another, but only if they avoided any sort of ego game whatever, beginning with a prohibition on using their names. If, for instance, someone wanted the person seated beside him to pass him something, he would say, Please, brother (or sister), pass me the eggs or waffles or carnation-pink coffee, would you?

  Was it all a bit much? Yes, it was. Did she feel, in Charlie’s words, like a sellout? Yes, again. Was it a violation of everything they believed in to hold a session without the sacrament, to trip without drugs? Was it even possible? Did she want to throw down her apron and go upstairs with Fitz—or Ken—take the sacrament and feel him inside her all night long while their minds soared and their bodies melded like the first animalcules in the progression of life, like protozoans and paramecia merging and budding and whatever else they were capable of? She did. But she understood the importance of what they were doing and what these anonymous strangers meant to them (money, just that, money), and as she bent over the elbow of a Park Avenue housewife and poured her another glass of Chablis the color of squid’s ink—or the restauranteur from Scarsdale or professor from Columbia—she tried to keep that in mind.

  And it would have worked, would have sailed as smoothly as things could possibly sail, both for her and the guests, if it weren’t for Corey. Corey and the other kids were supposed to stay out of sight, strictly and absolutely, and they’d been lectured on that score by Fitz, Charlie, Ken and Rick; if she’d forgotten about him in the chaos of the guests’ arrival, that was neither here nor there. He knew what to do. He was capable of entertaining himself, as were the rest of the kids. Royce and Fitz had lugged the television all the way across the yard and out to the Bowling Alley so they could watch Million Dollar Movie or Route 66, and she had personally gone out to the deli to select and purchase the sandwich things—capicola, Swiss cheese, salami, bologna, hard rolls—and the big bags of potato chips and bottles of Coke to go with them. She shared a joint with Fanchon in the kitchen, stirred food dye into the dishes, waitressed and hostessed and gave everybody her mysterious smile on cue.

  It just happened—karma—that she was passing through the front hall on one errand or another when the doorbell rang. Thinking it must be some late-arriving guest, she went to the door and pulled it open, smiling in anticipation, until she saw the policeman there, the first of a whole succession of policemen who would descend on the house over the months and years to come, as if there really were no refuge from the outside world. Standing beside him, their shoulders slumped and eyes downcast, were Corey, Nancy and Lori. The porch light glistened on the snow sprinkled over their hats and the shoulders of their coats. Behind them, the night fell back in a riot of slashing snowflakes.

  She was dressed in white, high on marijuana and Chablis, and her mysterious smile dropped right off her face like so much sloughed skin. There was one creaking infinitude of a moment during which no one said anything and the only sound was the sound of the wind, and then the policeman, his voice staid and automatic, was putting a question to her: “Do these kids belong here?”

  She looked to him first—the cop, who was younger than she was and whose bloodless face was squeezed under a too-tight fur cap with the earflaps standing up like signposts—and then to Corey, who wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “they do.” And then, finding an official voice herself, she asked, “What seems to be the problem?”

  The policeman was wearing black leather gloves and unconsciously fingering his duty belt, the gun there, the nightstick, the bullets—were those bullets? He was about to say something, his breath held in pale suspension like the dialogue balloons in the comics Corey devoured by the dozen, but Lori, still not looking up, said, “It’s bogus, the whole thing—we didn’t do anything.”

  “They were caught shoplifting,” the policeman—the cop—said. “Or this one was.” He pointed to Nancy, whose hair projected in tufts from under the hood of the quilted jacket she herself had earlier found on the hook in the kitchen.

  Nancy lifted her eyes now and looked her full in the face so that Joanie could see the plea there—and the guilt. “I was going to pay for it, I was—I just, I guess I just forgot, is all.”

  “A compact,” the cop said, the snow rioting behind him. “Gary Kracik, the store owner? He caught them in the act.”

  “If it’s a question of money—” she began but the cop held up a gloved palm to stop her.

  “This is a quiet village,” the cop said, lecturing her now. “We don’t have any crime and we want to keep it that way. I don’t know what you people do here, and as long as it’s legal and it stays here, that’s your business. But when you break the law there are consequences.” The cop paused. He looked perfectly at home, as if he’d spent his entire life right there on the doorstep. He was watching her face to be sure she appreciated what he was saying, was heeding it, that is. “And who, exactly,” he asked now, “are you?”

  “Joanie—Joan—Loney,” she said. “His mother.” And she was pointing now, to Corey, who still wouldn’t look at her.

  “And you live here?” The cop peered beyond her into the depths of the house, where one of the guests in her shapeless white robe was crossing the hall for some reason—the bathroom? More wine? “Or are you just visiting?”

  “Yes, I live here,” she said. “With my husband and the other members of our”—and here she stumbled, everything drifting on her in a hazy float of movement that seemed to mimic the snow—“research institute.”

  “And these girls?” She saw now that he had a leather-bound pad in one hand, which he flipped open to consult. “Nancy Eggers and Lori Cunningham?”

  “Yes, they live here too.”

  “And you’re willing to take responsibility for them?”

  She nodded.

  The snow jumped and settled and gnawed at the sky. The woman in the white robe gaped at the little scene they’d put together for her there in the doorway but kept on walking till she disappeared down the hall. The cop said, “All right, then. Since Mr. Kracik doesn’t want to press charges and the kids are local—Millbrook High, right?—we’re going to let the matter drop.”

  There was a silence, then the cop was folding his notepad back into the inner pocket of his jacket and the three kids, still with their heads down and shoulders slumped, filed into the house. She took hold of the door, thinking to ease it shut yet feeling that something more should be said—Thank you? Good night? Go home and die a quick death?—but before she could speak the cop leveled a look on her and said, “I hope you understand this is a onetime-only thing. There won’t be a repeat, correct?”

  “I understand,” she said, and then, as she was easing the door shut on a snowy dark sliver of the night, on the porch light and the cop’s slick bla
ck patrol boots and his black uniform and puffed-up jacket, she paused to add, “Thank you. We’re all very”—what were they?—“grateful.”

  Later, after the guests had taken their white robes and flakes of group mind up the candlelit stairs to bed, she pulled on her boots and coat and went out to the Bowling Alley to confront Corey. She was seething. Angrier at the girls than him, but furious with him all the same. What was he thinking? He couldn’t have said no? Couldn’t have stood up for himself? She imagined the girls talking him into it—Nancy, Nancy talking him into it—so he could serve as a distraction, holding the store owner’s attention while they stole things and nobody the wiser. That wasn’t how she’d raised him. Neither she nor Fitz had ever been in trouble with the law in their lives, not even for a speeding ticket, and to have her son mixed up in this—brought home by a cop, no less—was just beyond the pale. And the project, the sacrament, the unity of the inner circle—didn’t he realize how everything they were striving for was threatened by something like this? A cop on their doorstep? With all the notoriety the press had stirred up and what the other kids were saying in school and the way rumors must have flown around a stick-in-the-mud little hick town like this? And that was what it was too, a hick town, just as Corey had said right from the start. It was infuriating, so infuriating she barely noticed the snow she was kicking through or the wind beating at the flaps of her parka.

  It wasn’t far and she’d been there a hundred times, but somehow she got turned around, the snow transfiguring every feature of the landscape till it was unrecognizable, and before long she realized she’d gone right by the place. Angry at herself now—and her hands were freezing because she’d forgotten her gloves and why hadn’t she at least thought to bring a flashlight?—she had to backtrack through the blow, getting angrier by the minute, till finally she stumbled across the stone steps and went up them and into the warmth of the house.