Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  Fitz had ducked his head, grinned. “You could always read me, Dave.”

  “That’s my job—hell, you’re a psychologist, you ought to know that.”

  “What I wanted to ask is, have you got anything for me? Temporary, I mean, a day or two a week, help with the evaluations, IQ tests, whatever, even subbing—just to tide me over till the thesis is done and I can get back out on the job market.”

  What this cost him, in terms of self-worth, in sheer humiliation, was incalculable, but he was beyond all that now. All that counted now was bringing in a paycheck, any paycheck, something rather than nothing, because he’d never lived off anyone in his life and he wasn’t going to start doing it at this point no matter how forgiving Tim and Dick might be. When he’d got accepted at Harvard, Dave—and all the rest of them, teachers, administrators, even the superintendent—had looked at him as if he’d been named to the president’s cabinet or the Mercury space team, as if he’d won the lottery and hit a grand slam at Yankee Stadium on the same day. He’d relished that. The envious looks, the complicated handshakes and dry-throated congratulations—he was getting out of there, going on to something great and glorious, and they weren’t.

  Right. And here he was, begging.

  Dave said, “Millbrook. That’s where Leary and, who, Alpert, are now, isn’t it?” The fork scraped, he took a sip of coffee. “Are you part of that?”

  “I am. We’re all engaged in the research together. It’s—well, it’s exciting. New frontiers and all that, you know?”

  “We hear rumors—the stuff in the papers. It sounds pretty extreme.”

  He shrugged. “You know the papers—anything for a story. But listen, have you got anything for me?”

  “You sure you want to make that drive? It’s got to be forty minutes or more.”

  “At six in the morning? There’ll be nobody on the road.”

  “Except the snowplows.”

  “It’s only temporary. And it’s mostly a straight shot down the Taconic, right?”

  Dave played with his fork a minute, then set it down and stared right into him. “Sure,” he said, “we can always use subs. All you have to do is register with the district.” He gave him a thin smile. “We’ll call you, okay?”

  And then he got in the car, cursing himself, and drove through the slush to Millbrook, where one of the village’s two cruisers swung out behind him and flashed its red lights. He was already upset enough—Lori, Joanie, Corey, subbing—and though he’d had nothing to drink but coffee and nothing to smoke but tobacco, the sight of the cruiser in his rearview mirror and the single truncated whoop of the siren made his heart clench. His hands were trembling on the wheel as the officer approached the car—a man of forty with an expressionless face he’d seen around the village a dozen times but had never acknowledged because they were strangers and there was no need to acknowledge him because they were on opposite sides of the divide that made Millbrook what it was and gave the police department its rights and prerogatives.

  The man had a flashlight in his hand—it was dark now, a fine misting rain dancing in the headlights—and he shined it through the driver’s side window, at the same time making a circular gesture with his other hand, indicating that Fitz should roll the window down. Which he did, the wet air a cold kiss on his face and throat. “License and registration,” the officer said.

  “But I didn’t do anything—what’s this all about?”

  “License and registration,” the cop repeated.

  It was a simple request—unnecessary maybe, wrong, the heel of the boot—and though Fitz didn’t yet know it, it was the first in a long unspooling skein of requests, demands, searches, seizures and routine harassment of everybody who passed through the gates of the Hitchcock estate, though what they were doing, legitimately, violated no laws. Or hardly any. He dug his license out of his wallet and handed it to the cop, then began fishing through the glove box, looking for the registration as directed, but the glove box was a mess, stuffed with tissues, crumpled burger wrappers, maps, pens, notebooks, a pair of sunglasses—the fact was the station wagon had become a kind of communal car and anybody could have been driving it last. Okay. Fine. But the registration remained elusive. He said, “It’s right here somewhere, I know it is.”

  “You know why I stopped you?” the cop asked, bending down to peer through the window.

  “No, no idea.”

  “You didn’t signal back there—when you turned onto Franklin?”

  “I didn’t?”

  The cop shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, I thought I did. Everything’s okay though, isn’t it?”

  The cop took a minute, the fine misting rain shining on his black leather cap. “You’re up the end of the road, at the Alte Haus, right?”

  He nodded.

  “You live there?”

  He nodded again.

  “This license is a Massachusetts issue, are you aware of that?”

  “Yes, but—I mean, we just moved in.”

  “New York State law requires residents to possess and produce a valid state driver’s license at the request of a peace officer—and the law states that a new license must be obtained within thirty days of official residence. Are you aware of that?”

  “No, I wasn’t, but, as I say, we just got here—”

  “I’m going to have to write you up, failure to signal, invalid license, no vehicle registration.”

  “Oh, come on, give me a break—I’ve never had a ticket in my life.”

  The cop took his time. He was smiling, actually smiling. “Well, you’ve got one now.” He paused. “Actually,” he said, “you’ve got three of them.”

  3.

  In the next month he must have made the drive to Beacon five or six times, filling in for teachers who were out sick or just sitting in front of a space heater in their pajamas with a book and a mug of coffee laced with bourbon, using up their paid sick leave. Each time, without fail, he was pulled over by Officer Salter, he of the stone face, or his younger colleague, Officer Albright, on one pretext or another, though he’d paid the fines and mailed a Photostat of his registration to the courthouse and was careful never to drive under the influence or fail to use his signal light. Did he know his license plate light was out? Did he realize he hadn’t come to a full stop at the corner of Elm? Was he aware that the starburst crack in the lower right-hand corner of his windshield was technically a violation? Where was he going? Where had he been? He lived up at the Alte Haus, didn’t he?

  It wasn’t just him, it was everybody. Dick was flagged for speeding, Fanchon pulled over for failure to come to a complete stop not twenty feet from the entrance to the estate and Tim himself given a lecture by Officer Salter over the distinction between a blinking yellow light and a blinking red. And then there were the weekenders. The ones who didn’t arrive by taxi were subjected to the same sort of harassment, which didn’t bode well for the summer’s Castalia Foundation seminars, and though no one was arrested on any charge, trumped up or otherwise, it certainly didn’t enhance the Millbrook experience or improve anybody’s mind-set. Tim sent a letter to the police chief in protest and Dick followed up with a letter from his well-connected father’s well-connected lawyer and the police eventually backed off, though they’d served notice, and every transaction, every session, every high was tainted with the knowledge that they were out there, awaiting their opportunity.

  For his part, Fitz couldn’t remember a more depressing period in his life. Joanie came back to him, yes, and they were sleeping in the same bed and had one or two Saturday sessions where they melted into each other like before, but it couldn’t touch what he’d experienced with Lori—and Lori, infuriatingly, didn’t seem to want anything to do with him. She was always busy, reading, sketching, writing poetry in her big looping schoolgirl’s hand, helping in the kitchen, wandering the hills with her shoulders hunched and her head down or just sitting there playing solitaire in front of the fire, and no, she didn’t want
company, and no, she didn’t want to play two hands or pitch or hearts or anything else. Corey was no help. He was more distant than ever, and when Fitz tried to talk to him about Nancy and about what Jackie and some of the others—Lori—were risking with their massive doses of the drug, he got defensive, and after he’d got defensive, he denied everything. (“I never did it with Nancy or anybody else, I swear, not that it’s any of your business—or Mom’s either. And the only dose I ever take is a hundred mics, once a month—it’s a sacrament, remember?”) But the worst thing, the worst thing by far, was the Beacon School District. He was making thirty dollars a day, minus withholding and the cost of the traffic tickets, and to earn that pittance he had to endure overcrowded classrooms crammed to the windows with savage fermenting adolescents who saw him as a weak-kneed fraud and nothing more, and on top of that, every time he stepped out in the hall he was subjected to the unforgiving looks of his former colleagues. He wasn’t at Harvard. He wasn’t a Ph.D. He wasn’t climbing the academic ladder or making advances in the field. No, he was back here in prison, the worst kind of recidivist, and no time off for good behavior.

  “Hey, Fitz, I heard you were back,” one of the English teachers, Ron Wiesenthal, said to him in the hall one day.

  “Yeah.”

  Students—kids—flowed by them as if they were snags in a stream, which, in essence, they were. Ron had bags under his eyes. His suit was rumpled. He’d aged prematurely. He was nothing in the scheme of things and Fitz was—or had been. “So you’re okay, then? Things are good?”

  “Never better,” he’d said, and then went on to give him the story everybody already knew, about taking time off to finish his thesis and make a few bucks just to pay the bills—he knew how that was, didn’t he? Oh, yeah, he did—“I hear you, believe me”—and the subject of Millbrook, Timothy Leary and LSD never came up, but it was right there, front and center, in Ron Wiesenthal’s baggy eyes and everybody else’s too.

  Still, the communal experiment went on, more devotedly than ever, Tim presiding, Peggy and a handful of her Upper East Side friends showing up most weekends, Maynard blowing in and out with his air of glamour and untouchability. This was America, wasn’t it? What they were doing on their own property was their business and nobody else’s. And Tim—Tim was never happier than when he was flouting one convention or another. As far as the local constabulary were concerned, Tim borrowed an expression from Hollingshead to convey his sentiments: I piss on them from a great height.

  It happened that the vernal equinox fell on a Saturday that year, and so it was all but irresistible to throw a party—a big party, the biggest yet—to welcome back the sun and the promise of the lengthening days to come. Invitations went out—Celebrate the Equinox, the Alte Haus, Millbrook, 7:00 P.M.—and by eight the party was running on all cylinders, Dick and Charlie having stationed themselves at the door to greet each of the guests with a three-and-a-half-ounce paper cup of the sacrament, in liquid form, mixed with cherry Kool-Aid. For his part, Fitz was ready to let go and travel where the drug—and the company—took him. He’d had an especially galling time the previous day, when he’d gone in to substitute for a history teacher and wound up losing it over some little shit of a kid who refused to take his feet down off the desk in front of him and had to be escorted out into the hall and pinned up against the wall before he came to appreciate the nature of the transactional psychology going on between them. What he was thinking was I don’t need this shit, and he’d actually gone down to the principal’s office to tell Dave Jacobs to forget it, thanks but no thanks, but Dave wasn’t there, which just made it all the worse.

  Now, with a glass of brandy in one hand, a joint in the other and the drug beginning to channel its familiar messages through his veins and into the gaps between his neurons, he began to feel almost normal, even if his fingertips were glowing like flashlights and people’s faces took on a metallic cast, as if they’d been cast in bronze and arrayed round the room like so many masks in a gallery. The lights were low, the music strictly jazz (Coltrane reinventing the soprano saxophone on “My Favorite Things”), Joanie in a huddle with Fanchon, and Lori nowhere to be seen, but Flora Lu . . . right here before him, sitting on a mattress pushed up against the near wall, the monkey asleep on her shoulder. He didn’t say Hi or Mind if I join you? but just eased down beside her, his back braced against the wall and his legs splayed out before him. “Thank God it’s not rock and roll,” he said, indicating the big KLH speaker not two feet from her, and she acknowledged the sentiment with a quick dip of her chin and a smile that melted the bronze right off her face and brought all her beauty rushing to the surface.

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “Charlie’s worse than the kids. It’s all he talks about, the Beatles-this and the Beatles-that—”

  “The juvenilization of America. Ed Sullivan. Can you believe that? He used to have Maynard on, real music, not this, this crap.”

  She was vehement, and in her vehemence, she awakened the monkey, which leveled an evil look on him and immediately sat up and began furiously scratching its crotch before settling back down again, its monkey face nestled in the silk of her hair and its tail lazily twitching at her left breast.

  “Charlie used to be all about jazz,” he offered, “a real aficionado, you know? Not that he still isn’t, it’s just this teenage music seems to have taken over his brain like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers—you think he’s had his body snatched?”

  Flora Lu liked the idea. She laughed. “Yeah, sure,” she said, “that explains it all—they’ve all had their bodies snatched, especially the Beatles, and who?—Ringo.”

  He was thinking about taking her hand. There it was, curled casually beside him on the mattress, and he had an urge to experience the feel of the skin there, to engage it, stroke it, a companionable urge that had nothing and everything to do with the ascent of the drug, but then he felt the faintest tickle on the back of his own hand and saw that there was a flea there, a monkey flea, poised to bite him—or not just poised, it was biting him. He slapped at it, but it evaded him, making a mighty backward leap into its protectress’s lap. “Your monkey has fleas,” he said.

  She grimaced. “I keep buying him flea collars, but did you ever try to keep a flea collar on a monkey?” She reached up and pulled the animal down from her shoulder, set it on the mattress and gave it an admonitory pat on the hind end. “Now shoo,” she said. “Go spread your fleas someplace else. You hear me?” Another pat, this time a bit more forceful. And then, as if it were a huge spider, it scampered straight up the wall, across the top of the wainscoting and shot on up the banister to disappear in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

  He was seeing colors, which was usual, and he could feel the brandy as a complementary force, putting the brakes on the wheel cranking round in his brain, if ever so tentatively. “You didn’t have to get rid of him,” he said. “I mean”—and now he was just talking to hear himself—“he wasn’t bothering anybody.”

  “No,” and she was laughing again, “just his fleas were.”

  “They chew their fleas, you know that, right? Groom each other, bite them between their teeth? Nobody likes fleas.”

  She gave him the full force of her smile. “The poor fleas. They’re just misunderstood.”

  “Right,” he said, nodding vigorously, and he was going to say “Do you want to start the Millbrook chapter of the National Flea Protective Society or should I?” when a wave crested inside him and the words washed up on the shore, each syllable broken and fragmented like so many shards of porcelain, which really didn’t seem to matter because he wasn’t looking into Flora Lu’s eyes anymore—he was focused on an indistinct clump of shadow all the way across the room. Lori was part of that clump of shadow. He’d heard her voice—high, tinny, as if she were breathing Freon instead of oxygen—and now he heard it again and it made him rise to his feet in a confusion of pinwheeling shapes and colors and go right for it.

  Lori was do
wn on the floor, slumped in one of the low cutoff chairs, a blanket thrown over her legs. Her face was the face he saw every night when he closed his eyes, the face that had been revealed to him in the meditation house in a way no other face ever had, not even Joanie’s, not even Corey’s. He knew her. He knew her better than anybody, and now he was right there beside her, sinking into the floor, asking—and this was a routine between them, or had been—“You see God yet?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, and she wasn’t looking at him but at the hunched-over shadow beside her, a shadow with a face, a guy—a boy—“we see Him all the time, right, Toby?”

  Toby, predictably, said, “Right.”

  “And what does He tell us? He tells us, I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  Toby laughed and she joined in, point/counterpoint.

  “No, come on, be serious.”

  “Nothing’s serious, man,” Toby said. “We’re tripping, okay? So lighten up.”

  For some reason, for every reason—the way she’d turned her back on him as if what they’d experienced together was nothing, his thesis, Beacon, Joanie and Ken and Fanchon, the way she leaned into this weasel-faced kid from Bard she’d tripped alone with up on Ecstasy Hill back in October when he himself hardly knew her—this rubbed him the wrong way. Suddenly he was angry, and nobody got angry on this drug because it was a leveler and it took you outside of all that, but this time was different. He said, “Fuck you.”