Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  “Aren’t you going to join me?”

  “It’s too early,” he said.

  She pulled her feet up on the couch, slipped them beneath the cushions and arranged the comforter over her legs with a brisk snap of her wrists. “You didn’t answer my question. I mean, really? Because isn’t this what we’re supposed to be doing out here together? Pushing the limits, right? Making breakthroughs?” She paused, ran a finger across her lower lip. “And screwing. We’re supposed to be screwing too, aren’t we?”

  “Yoni and lingam.”

  “Right,” she said, and laughed.

  He picked up the bottle and rattled it like a maraca and she laughed again. It was a strange moment in a strange cold house with this shivering girl right there beside him, spirit incarnate, her lips compressed and her eyes never leaving his face. He positioned the bottle over his palm, shook out a pill, lingered for just the fraction of a beat, and shook out another.

  At the end of the week they both emerged, hand in hand. There was no welcoming committee, no applause, just Joanie and Susannah, who’d apparently delegated themselves to go bring them back and prepare the house for the next pair, to be selected that night. There had been a knock at the door, which he hadn’t answered. Then the door had opened and there was Joanie, there was Susannah. He was sitting beside Lori on the couch, the morning at the windows again, and there was a tray in the front hall with breakfast on it, right next to the tray from the previous night and the previous afternoon and the previous morning. He’d been fasting—they both had—but it wasn’t through any conscious choice because they weren’t anchorites in the desert and they weren’t abnegating the flesh, just the opposite. They were essential, clamped together, lock and key. He had no intimation that the week was up or that they hadn’t been eating or sleeping or that there was a world, a material world, outside the door of the meditation house.

  He remembered Lori peeling an orange, the way her fingers slid in under the shield of color to isolate and annul it, and he remembered the chessboard and the bowling alley in the basement, how she perched over the ball and the pins clattered and they kept score and battled for dominance and how it came to him that the game was a metaphor for life itself, the ball a planetary sphere hurtling through space and the pins emblematic of the flesh, of mortality, of the roar and crash of annihilation. It was bleak. It was naked to the dregs. And it wasn’t a game, most definitely not a game.

  Joanie’s voice, his wife’s voice, then Susannah’s, new voices altogether that flitted and chased each other round the room, no sense yet, just sound. Then he was up and moving and the world was spinning back at him, the big black ball slicing across the gleaming strip of the alley under the lights that were too bright until it landed with a thump in the gutter and he had hold of her hand, Lori’s hand, and she was moving too.

  There was sunshine, right there, right on the front porch, and it was painful, so they fished out their sunglasses, and it was only then that they let go of each other because they needed both hands to pat down their pockets, dig out the glasses and fit them over their ears. Joanie, her eyes lit like holy fire, said, “Jesus, you look like shit. You both look like shit.”

  He didn’t know how to respond to that because he wasn’t quite back in his body yet and wouldn’t be till he’d slept through the rest of the morning and the afternoon and found himself crouched over the carpet in the library with a sandwich in one hand and a beer in the other, waiting for Tim to dip his hand into the hat while the monkey screeched from somewhere upstairs and the next couple, the next voyagers, waited to discover who they were.

  2.

  What he learned from his week in the Bowling Alley was that nothing was absolute, not his attachment to Joanie or his son or the consciousness he’d inhabited all the way back to the oral stage of infancy. He learned that imprints matter and that theses (which, in a kind of internal mantra, he kept rhyming with feces) were just a distraction from the inner life, the only life that counted, and beyond that, from love. Erotic love and agape too, which were indistinguishable if you went deep enough. He came back to the Alte Haus and sat beside Joanie while Tim fished in the sombrero and paired Royce Eggers and Alice and he felt nothing but joy for them. When he went up to bed that night, back to bed, Joanie was there with him, but she felt strange, her body all wrong, the way she moved and spoke and how her consciousness ebbed and flowed without him. She’d taken the sacrament—it was Saturday night—and if she lay there in the dark all wrapped up in herself he didn’t know it because he was asleep.

  In the days that followed, he gradually came back to himself, back to the world of splitting and stacking wood, scrubbing pans, reading, writing, typing, talking, listening to Indian music, piano trios and jazz (and the Beatles, the inescapable Beatles, who seemed to be twanging and thumping through one speaker or another throughout the house from daybreak to the hour of the wolf). He put gas in the car, went to the bank, the drugstore, the diner, worried over the money he could no longer contribute to the communal pot for food and other necessities—brandy, scotch, gin—and how he was possibly going to find it. He drank too much. His personality shrank. His son was a ghost and his wife a cipher.

  What was it? Nothing quite fit right, as if the world were a suit of clothes that had shrunk in the dryer and had to be pinched and tugged till it stretched back out again. Joanie didn’t come to bed the second night he was back—or the third night either. He saw her at meals, in the hallway, on the staircase and around the fire at night, when everybody was chatty and expansive and the drinks and marijuana circulated and every subject imaginable was batted around, from women’s lib to Johnson and civil rights to jazz and rock and roll and the eating of bush meat in Africa, including monkeys, which, according to Charlie, who’d been in Gambia for a week once, tasted just like monkey, but he didn’t seem to have much to say to her because the essential thing, the thing the whole household had to understand, was that she wasn’t Lori. Nothing against her—she was his wife, she was Joanie, and he loved her—but he wasn’t imprinted on her, not anymore. It was Lori he wanted, Lori he obsessed over, Lori he needed to be with through every minute of every day.

  Which was problematic on a number of counts. The first being that the fundamental purpose of the experiment was to dissolve sexual jealousy and exclusivity, not encourage it, and the second that Lori didn’t seem to feel the same way about him, or at least she didn’t make it apparent in any way he could see. There she was, just as she’d been before, slump-shouldered, dark, enigmatic, huddled at the end of the table with the other kids—with Nancy, Corey, Jackie, Suzie—or stretched out on the couch beside Tim, who, she’d confided, was her God, and accordingly had had her any number of times and ways. He’d learned about that in detail, about how she’d seen Tim’s picture in a magazine and felt an instant connection—karma—and cultivated Nancy so she could get her foot in the door and get close to him, get close to them all, and to the sacrament. He’d learned too that the kids—no surprise—had their own forms and rituals, a society within a society, and that some of them (Not Corey, not yet, don’t worry) kept pushing the limits. Jackie had spent two days locked in his room at the top of the south tower, tripping on an astonishing 1,000 mics, and she herself, along with Nancy and a guy she knew from Bard (Toby Husted?) had done more than half that up on Ecstasy Hill the weekend they’d all gone camping back in October.

  And then there was Joanie.

  She came into the room one morning—by his count it was the fourth day he’d been back—and without a word began gathering up socks, underwear, T-shirts and towels and stuffing them into the laundry bag while he sat there at his desk, puzzling over half a dozen sheets of graphs he’d drawn up in his previous life and wondering what he was going to do with them. He’d long since given up any notion of making his mark in the field—his thesis wasn’t going to be revolutionary like Tim’s, just workmanlike, a compilation and comparison of Skinnerian lab studies that was as yet searching for a conclusion
or even an overriding idea. He just wanted to get through with it, that was all, wanted his degree, though it seemed to matter less and less as the days went on and the interpersonal became all there was.

  She was making an inordinate amount of noise for somebody simply stuffing clothes into a bag, but he didn’t turn around, didn’t want to be distracted, though he was already distracted, had been distracted before she even came into the room. He heard her rummaging around Corey’s room and a moment later she came back through the doorway with a second bag, flung it down beside the first and began stripping the bed—their bed—and balling up the dirty sheets in one of the pillowcases.

  After a moment of this—she was exaggerating her breathing, sighing, grunting—she said, “I can’t believe you,” and now he did turn around.

  “What do you mean?”

  She was wearing sweatpants, moccasins and a tan cable-knit sweater three sizes too big for her, a man’s sweater, and it wasn’t one of his. “I mean, I haven’t slept here the last two nights and you don’t say anything about it? Jesus, did you even notice?”

  “Of course I noticed.”

  “So why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know, I thought you were”—a phrase of Charlie’s popped into his head—“doing your own thing.”

  “I was. I am.” Her hands jumped, the pillowcase swelled. “I’ve been sleeping with Ken. And Fanchon. The three of us. Just for a little”—and here her voice broke—“affection. Affection, Fitz, you know what that is?”

  “Sure,” he said, “of course I do,” but he didn’t get up from the desk.

  “I’m in love with him.”

  He saw Ken’s face then, the knowing eyes and ear-to-ear smile, the shaggy crew cut he’d grown out in imitation of Tim, the height of him, the power, and he saw Fanchon too, with her everted lips and her soft pink nipples he’d sucked till they were stiff and hard. He couldn’t be jealous—they were beyond jealousy here and besides which it wasn’t Joanie he wanted or Fanchon either, it was Lori, only Lori—but he was. “Come on,” he said, and he was on his feet now, holding her, pressing her to him, “I did miss you. And I want you. You’re my wife.”

  “You don’t want me,” she said, and she pushed away from him. “You want her, that little slut, that child, that infant—isn’t that right?”

  He could have said they were one big happy family, could have insisted it was a passing thing, the effect of the drug and nothing more, could have denied the accusation in no uncertain terms, but he didn’t. He didn’t say a word.

  In the afternoon, in the wake of that scene and the living death of the work spread out on the desk before him, he pulled on his thermal underwear, slipped into a pair of jeans, a sweater and his hooded parka and went out for a walk. It was unforgivably cold, the twisted black branches of the trees rattling in the wind, the day low-ceilinged and sunless, a mockery of the memory of Mexico. He needed to clear his head, or that was what he told himself, but after his week in the meditation house, his week with Lori, the phrase had no meaning—he wasn’t even sure if he had a head anymore. A skull, yes, calcium-rich bone with an integument of skin and hair pulled up over it, but the brain inside didn’t seem to be his anymore, or not solely his. The wind blew. The snow crunched. The branches rattled. He walked, simplest thing in the world, one foot in front of the other, and before long, without intending it or even thinking about it, he was deep in the forest, where the snow, crusted and degraded, clung haphazardly to the trunks of the trees and the trees massed and thinned and massed again.

  Tim had seen a wolf out here, though that hardly seemed possible, wolves having been eradicated a century ago, but then one of them could have migrated down from Canada—a whole pack of them for that matter, who knew? There were certainly enough deer around to feed them. He saw deer tracks everywhere, holes poked in the snow as if by phantom ski poles, and their droppings scattered like so many handfuls of raisins in the clearings. And what was that Russian story where the family in the sled was heading back home in the dark of night, the wolves right on them, and they flung their baby out into the snow to distract them and save themselves? Would he have flung Corey out? Or no, Lori—would he have shoved her over the transom and whipped the horses on?

  At some point he got turned around, the forest a maze in itself and he the animal seeking pleasure in the absence of pain, but the estate was bounded by county roads and there were any number of outbuildings to navigate by, including a farm on the east end of the property, so it wasn’t really a problem. He was back before the kids returned from school, the house quiet, a rich aroma of communal cookery wafting through the gold-ceilinged rooms and the fire going strong in the library. Which was where he found Lori, all alone, crouched on her knees before the fire and feeding sticks into the flames—kindling—when what the fire needed at this stage were the split logs stacked outside on the porch. This was wasteful behavior, lazy really, the sort of thing you’d expect from a child, and no matter what Joanie said Lori was no child.

  “Hi,” he said, and she swung round, startled, her face small and pale. “Need help with that?”

  She didn’t answer, or not in a way that made any sense. She said, “‘I’m nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody, too? / Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! / They’d banish us, you know.’”

  “You’re quoting again.”

  “Yes,” she said, and turned to poke at the fire.

  “So we’re two nobodies, huh?”

  She didn’t answer. Sparks jumped and floated across the flames like glittering insects.

  He was standing over her now, feeling strange again, out of place, out of body, as if he were back in the meditation house. It was a moment—a flashback—and then it passed. “Are you all right? Everything okay?”

  She got to her feet—her bare feet, her monkey feet—and put her arms around him. “I’m fine,” she said. “Never better.” Then she broke away and went to the couch, folding her legs under her and snatching up the comforter all in one motion. “Why, do I seem sad or sick or whatever?”

  “I don’t know. I just had a feeling, that’s all. I mean, seeing you here all alone, wasting kindling on the fire that really could use a log, a couple of logs—”

  “Are you criticizing me? Talking down to me? Again?”

  What he wanted was to hold on to her, feel her beneath him, feel her move. “No,” he said, and he was sliding in beside her on the couch now, “I would never talk down to you, never—you know that. What I want to do, the only thing I want to do, is go to bed with you. Right now.” He put his arm over her shoulder, brought his face to hers. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go upstairs.”

  Her face—he leaned in to kiss her, but she shifted away from him—was the most perfect physical manifestation he had ever seen, the living presence, but her expression didn’t match it. She looked—what? Frightened? Or no, no, worse than that: detached. “I’m coming down with a cold,” she said. “I don’t feel good. Really.”

  “Don’t give me that crap—you just told me you were fine, never better. So what is it, what’s the matter? Don’t you know what I’m going through here?”

  The small voice, the distant eyes, the pout: “I don’t feel like it.”

  “I do,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “What is this, a debate? It’s been four days—four days!”

  She turned her head away, shut her eyes. “‘The brain is wider than the sky, / For, put them side by side, / The one the other will include / With ease, and you beside.’”

  “Jesus Christ! I don’t need quotes, or what, riddles? I need you. Don’t you hear me? Don’t you care?”

  Her eyes flashed open then and she wasn’t looking at him but beyond him to where Tommy Eggers, six foot one, gawky, thin-shanked, his face red with the cold and a scarf wrapped like a noose round his throat, was edging up to the fire, his hands spread wide to catch the warmth. “It’s colder than a witch’s tit out there,”
he observed, glancing over his shoulder to where the two of them sat squeezed in at the end of the couch.

  He heard himself say, “Yeah, and how do you suppose the witch’s mother feels about it?” and it was nonsensical, a cover, something to say while he took his arm from Lori’s shoulder and inched over on the cushion.

  Tommy—he wasn’t a bad kid, wasn’t a kid who meant anybody harm—was watching his face for clues, but there were no clues to give up, only facts, and the facts were that he’d had his arm around Lori, the teenager, who’d just rebuffed him as if they barely knew each other, as if they hadn’t gone deeper together than any couple in human history, and he was feeling poisonous. Tommy said, “Why don’t you tell me about it, Fitz—tell us.”

  He was on his feet now and Lori was way down there below him, shrinking till she might have been a thousand miles away. “It’s a long story,” he said, looking not at her but at Tommy, only Tommy, “and it has a lot of cold tits in it. And you know what else? Cold cunts. Cold cunts too.”

  It was around that time—late February, early March—that he was pulled over by the village police for no apparent reason. He was coming back from Beacon, of all places, where he’d gone to have a cup of coffee with Dave Jacobs, principal of his old school, by way of catching up. He was the one who’d reestablished the connection, calling Dave at home one night and wondering if he might buy him a cup of coffee—or a drink, would he rather go out for a drink? Dave had seemed surprised to hear from him, but not unfriendly, just the opposite. “It’s good to hear your voice, Fitz. We figured it’d be a long time before we heard from you again—how’s Harvard treating you?” He told him Harvard was treating him great, but did he know he’d moved to Millbrook? To finish up his thesis? Yeah, Millbrook, what a coincidence, huh?

  They met after school the next day, at a diner Fitz used to frequent in the old days of toil and trouble—toil and boredom, actually—and nothing had changed. The plasticized menus might have been a little grimier, a little more creased and dog-eared, but the offerings, from ham and eggs with a side of toast or pancakes (Breakfast Served All Day!) to the blue-plate special (Chicken Parmesan with choice of spaghetti or mashed) and the allegedly homemade pies, were the same as they’d always been, as were the prices and the specials listed on the chalkboard behind the counter. Dave was the same too, early fifties, crew cut patched with gray, suit, tie, buffed black shoes the size of cement blocks. They exchanged pleasantries, ran down some of the gossip on former colleagues Fitz barely remembered, even tried out the weather for a bit, till finally, scraping up the remnants of a slice of coconut cream pie with the edge of his fork, Dave asked, “So to what do I owe the honor?”