Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  He was leaning against the doorframe. It wasn’t just his legs that felt heavy—it was his torso too, his arms, his shoulders, his head. He wanted another drink. He didn’t want another drink. “Are you tripping?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Some of us just felt like it after the meeting, you know—Royce, Lori, Tim—but not Rick. Rick’s downstairs. He’s already asleep.” Her face was washed of expression in the candlelight. “It’s just coming on,” she murmured. “You?”

  “No, not tonight. Tonight’s just brandy and maybe a little pot—just enough to get fuzzy around the edges.” It was a school night and school nights kept him tethered. If the phone rang at six A.M., he’d have to get up, put on a tie and drive down to Beacon to endure another day among the adolescents. Brandy he could handle, pot even, but not the sacrament—the sacrament required a whole lot more space, an infinitude, really. And God, God too. Or at least the promise of Him.

  He became aware then of a faint murmur of voices coming from down the hall and an even fainter drift of music rising from somewhere below. The doorframe dug into his shoulder, but he didn’t move.

  When she spoke again, her voice was caught deep in her throat. “Do you want to join me?”

  It was a delicate moment. There was nothing about her that was seductive but the question itself, and it wasn’t so much a question as a plea. She lay there motionless atop the covers in the flickering light, fully clothed, with her hair splayed out over the pillow and her legs crossed at the ankles. If her feet had been bare, that would have been one thing, but they weren’t—she was wearing a pair of thick white socks because the room was as cold as a cave, and he couldn’t help thinking how much easier all this would be if only it were summer and it was like it was in Zihuatanejo, everything free and easy and no worries about anything, not even socks.

  “Well, actually,” he said, searching for the right tone, “the truth is, I was just curious, that’s all—you know, to see how this was going to go? But really, I have to get up in the morning. Or might have to. That’s the bitch of it with subbing, because you never know.”

  She was silent a moment, and then, her voice tightening, she said, “If you’re looking for Lori, she’s with Royce, I think, down the end of the hall, last room on the left.”

  So he extricated himself and found a use for his legs again. The hallway was a conduit, a tube, and he made his way down it, guided by the murmur of voices—or no, it was a single voice now, Lori’s—until he found himself leaning into another doorframe and peering into another candlelit room. Lori was there. On a mattress, propped up on one elbow beside Royce, an unzipped sleeping bag thrown over them both. Lori was reading aloud from a paperback—Steppenwolf; he recognized the cover, with its mysterious shadows and the figure of a brooding man, the thinker, the traveler, the one who goes deeper than anyone ever has and finds not enlightenment but nothingness—and Royce, his eyes closed and his head thrown back, was listening. Or not. His eyes were shut, his baldness gleaming in the candlelight. “‘Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business,’” Lori read in her strange canned whoop of a voice, “‘he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.’”

  He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to clap, give her a little applause for her effort, but instead he said, “Storytime,” and she looked up and saw him there where she hadn’t expected him to be or anybody else either. Her face gave nothing away. Was she glad to see him? Irritated? Was this what she’d thought the third-floor experiment would be like—reading aloud to a deep-diving bald-headed thirty-something man while another thirty-something man, the one she knew best, stood looming in the doorway?

  “Oh, hi, Fitz,” she said, without missing a beat. “You want to join us?”

  When he didn’t say anything, she went on, the words coming in a nervous rush, which tipped her hand: she wasn’t made of ice, after all. “We were just reading to each other, like our favorite passages, Royce started off and then I got into it and it’s, it’s”—she waved a hand, searching for the word—“amazing.” She patted the bed beside her. “Come on. Sit down. Do you want to listen?”

  It was a narrow mattress, full-size or maybe even a single. He could have squeezed in beside her on the floor and that would have been better than nothing, and he saw that she was wearing a sweater, her black turtleneck, which was all right, which was fine, but the sleeping bag was pulled up to her waist and whether she was wearing her jeans or not, her panties, he couldn’t say and because he couldn’t say and because he was drunk, he said, “I don’t know. Do you want me to?”

  She shrugged. And Royce, responding to the sound of his voice from some faraway place, flashed open his eyes, looked directly at him and said, “Wow,” then closed them again.

  Fitz hadn’t moved, though everything was so heavy inside him now. He said, “This is crazy,” and his voice cracked. “Look at yourself,” he said. “Look at me. I mean, what are you doing?”

  Her eyes were open but whatever she was seeing, it wasn’t him. Finally she said, “Living. Living, Fitz. On the planet Earth. Or no, that’s not right: the planet Millbrook.” She smiled then, her big smile, the one that transported her from the plane of the conventional to the exalted. “How about you, Fitz? What are you doing?”

  4.

  A June morning, the air heavy as a wet sock and the sun hanging unencumbered overhead. He was right out in the middle of it, mowing the lawn, aware only of the roar of the mower, of the way it sparked and rattled when it chewed up a handful of pebbles or took a long wheezing breath over the hidden twigs and branches the kids were supposed to have raked up and tossed on the pile for the solstice bonfire. Everything in his field of vision had taken on a hard white edge, as if traced in light, the sun glorious and reigning supreme, the trees in freeze-frame, the house a stage set. He was wearing tennis sneakers, a pair of shorts and a T-shirt he’d sweated through an hour ago—and his sunglasses. They were the essential piece of equipment here. He’d taken a microdose after breakfast—everybody had—to get him through the task at hand, to enliven things a little as the twigs jumped and the mower roared and the sky bore down on him.

  What they were doing, collectively, was sprucing the place up with two goals in mind: the renewal of the weekend seminars and the big blowout Fourth of July party they were planning for some two hundred guests, which was to feature a barbecue pit, clams on the half shell and Maynard Ferguson’s fifteen-man band set up under a white circus tent on the front lawn. Tim and a few of the others—Charlie, Alice, Paulette—were crouched over the rounded stones lining the long driveway with wet brushes and buckets of white paint, trading Tom Sawyer jokes. Ken and Fanchon were overseeing the weeding and replanting of the flowerbeds and Suzie, Richard, Ronald and a couple of the other kids were taking clippers to the mad growth of shrubbery that was threatening to engulf the house till Tim had begun to joke it was like the Beast’s castle in the Cocteau movie, which, as Charlie pointed out, was a whole trip in itself.

  He pushed the mower into the high grass and it sputtered and choked and spat out the two halves of a tennis ball in a slurry of yellow-green weed and he tipped back the mower to clear the blades, then dropped it and pushed again. He could feel the strain in his shoulders, but that was good, that was what he wanted—pain on his own terms—because otherwise he was left to face the fact that Joanie wasn’t there on the lawn with him and she wasn’t painting stones or planting flowers either. No, she was on the other side of the house, dressed in pedal pushers and a halter top and with her hair pinned up like the housewife of the month, making one trip after another up the stairs to their bedroom and down again to the car.

  This process, brisk, efficient, up and down, the two suitcases, the steamer trunk, was the end result of a series of reversals and misunderstandings that had reached the tipping point just over a week ago. He’d been up early that day, long before the alarm, and he’d slipped out of
bed without waking her and gone down to make himself a cup of coffee and sit by the phone, fervently hoping Dave Jacobs would call—he needed the thirty dollars—while just as fervently hoping he wouldn’t. Sitting there in the hall in the soft trembling light, sipping yesterday’s warmed-over coffee and lighting his first cigarette, he felt something come over him, not a break with reality, but a slippage, certainly a slippage, so that what had seemed so definite—wall, table, glass, cup, sun—was undermined by a whole new presence seething beneath it. He saw himself as from a distance, a partially dressed great ape with a tube of tobacco in one hand and the concentrated residue of a caffeinated plant in the other and knew that he knew nothing whatever of this or any other world. It wasn’t a flashback. It had nothing to do with the drug. It was a glimpse of something else, something numinous that underpinned the cardboard cutout that was the world he pretended to know, and it made him feel such a surge of joy it brought him up out of the chair, to his feet, to the window, to the light. The phone rang. The phone rang again. And again. And he let it ring till Dave Jacobs gave up and the house fell back into silence.

  At some point he became aware of a noise behind him, a faint rustling—one of the dogs, the cats, the monkey?—and turned round to see Lori standing there, perfectly still, just watching him. She was wearing cutoff blue jeans and one of the embroidered peasant blouses the women had got for a song in Mexico, which somebody must have given her—or she’d appropriated. Because she was like that: if she saw something she wanted, she took it. No matter, because it looked good on her, a canvas for the deep tan of her face, throat and limbs. She didn’t say hi. She didn’t quote a poem. She said, “You see what kind of day it is out there?”

  He was at the window, everything shining, and he’d just gone out of his body without the assistance of Albert Hofmann or Tim or anybody else. “I do,” he said, and then he said it again, because this was the glory and the kingdom too: “I do.”

  “You want to go for a walk? Before everybody gets up and spoils it?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” he said, and she crossed the floor to him, took his hand and led him out the door and into the soft warm glow of the morning.

  The grass was high, in need of cutting, and it held the dew so that his cuffs were wet through before he’d gone fifty feet. She had no such problem—she was barefoot, bare-legged, the blades of the grass swiping at her ankles and calves like brushes at a car wash, and she held fast to his hand, the first contact they’d had in weeks, which only made him float all the higher. Neither of them said a word—they didn’t have to. They were out in the morning, just that, and it made so much sense to him he wondered why he hadn’t been out here every day since the sun had come back, but that was complicated in a whole host of ways—Beacon, Dave Jacobs, late nights, late mornings. Joanie. His fecis.

  Where were they going? Toward the lake. Of course, the lake, which was a sacrament in itself, spread out before them in a glaze of light. Soon they were out of the deep grass and on a path just wide enough for two that led down to the dock where the rowboat was tethered, and the minute he saw it there he knew what they were going to do as clearly as if it had all been planned in advance, as if lakes and rowboats had been created for just this moment. “You want to go out?” he asked, and she just nodded, let go of his hand and skipped down the length of the dock to drop into the stern of the boat and sit there looking up at him as he paused to roll up his pants and kick off his shoes.

  “I love this,” he said, easing into the boat and feeling the lake tremble beneath him. “No school for me,” he said, taking up the oars and shoving off, everything clean, perfect, still. “Not today.”

  “Right,” she said, “let’s play hooky together,” and whether that made sense or not, since she was playing hooky on a permanent basis, didn’t matter. He took it for what it was—a gesture, a pleasantry, an invitation. She was back, at least for now, and now was all that mattered.

  There was the smell of the water, fresh-turned under the oars, a smell that took him back to the time before he’d met Joanie, when water skis sustained him and his parents were young and psychology just a word in the dictionary. Mist rose, dissipated. Sparrows hopped along the shore, a crow called from the top of a pine. The boat glided on a string. Behind them, in the distance, was the house, where people would be stirring or not. It was the final week of school and the kids, Corey included, had been going in selectively, and aside from Susannah, and sometimes Joanie, depending on her mood, nobody really bothered much about them anymore—they could feed themselves and they were adept at exercising their powers of ambulation through the simple expedient of putting one foot in front of the other. Let them go to school, let them stay home: it was all the same. In the next moment the house dropped out of sight and he felt himself expanding till he could have absorbed the entire lake and the hills beyond it like some fantastic amoeba of the mind, and all was well, all was very, very well.

  She was right there facing him, inches away, her legs tucked under the seat. The oars were extensions of his arms, the waters parted and the boat slipped across the surface, trailing its wake behind them in a continuous pattern of loops and folds that sparked under the sun. It was a big lake, deep, clear enough at this time of year to see twenty feet down. He rowed till they were out in the middle, far from the sight of the house or any of the other buildings, then shipped the oars and let the boat drift. “This is nice,” Lori murmured, leaning back, her face to the sky. Then she stretched her legs, lifted her feet in tandem and eased them down in his lap, all the while watching his eyes to gauge his response. “You mind?”

  In answer, he stroked her ankles, her feet, her slim tanned calves. The boat drifted, the water lapped. After a while he said, “You’re up early this morning—I mean, that was a surprise.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve just been wanting to do that, get up early, I mean. You know, embrace the day, all that?”

  He didn’t ask her where she’d slept, though he’d heard she’d given up on the third-floor experiment and gone back to sleeping in the room she’d appropriated in the back of the house. Instead he asked, “You get anything to eat?”

  “No. I wasn’t hungry. And the kitchen’s always such a mess—I can’t really sit down to eat if everything’s all over the place. You?”

  “The whole schmear,” he said. “Coffee, black, and a cigarette.”

  She laughed and then she went quiet. “Just as well,” she said after a moment. “Because I brought something along”—she patted the pocket of her cutoffs—“that really goes better on an empty stomach.”

  He could have drawn back, could have thought of Dave Jacobs, Joanie, Corey, putting some money in the pot instead of living off the goodwill of everybody else, seeing to his thesis, improving the minds of the rudderless students of the Beacon School District and all the rest of the shit that was pinning him down till he felt like he was chained inside a cage sinking into the depths of a cold dark sea, but he didn’t. He just said, “You’re a real altruist, aren’t you?”

  Before he knew it, the sun poked through the tops of the trees, then sprang clear of them, rising steadily till it took command of the sky. He was feeling no pain, only bliss. He watched Lori rise and dip with the motion of the boat, watched the trees dance across the shore behind her. When he felt thirsty, he leaned over, cupped his hands to the water and drank. After a time he became vaguely aware of the heat of the sun, his forearms prickling and the skin stretched tight over his face, and when she said something about it he picked up the oars and rowed them through sheaves of blistering color to the far shore, where he tied up in the shade of a willow and they both stripped down and plunged into the water. They swam. They lay in the grass. They swam. They lay in the grass. Then the wheel of the day took another turn and they wound up stretched out flat on their backs in the bottom of the boat, watching the clouds roll on overhead while the breeze took them wherever it wanted.

  It was late afternoon by the time t
hey got back. Rowing, he kept glancing over his shoulder to home in on the dock, and as the dock grew larger he saw that there was someone there, a woman in a sundress and floppy hat he at first took to be Susannah, but wasn’t Susannah at all. It was Joanie. Wearing Susannah’s hat—or one just like it. He was free of the elation now, coming down off the drug and the glory of the day, his shoulders ached and he was starving and badly sunburned, especially in those places where the sun didn’t ordinarily reach. He felt something squeeze tight inside him.

  Why his wife was there, he couldn’t imagine—unless something had gone wrong. His first thought was for Corey—had he got hurt, been in an accident? But no, that couldn’t be, because she was just sitting there tranquilly at the edge of the dock, a book open in her lap, her feet dangling in the water. All right, fine: his wife was there, enjoying the day, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Lori was his obsession and he hadn’t gone to Beacon and marriage was possessiveness no matter what Tim said or how much of the sacrament you took. He maneuvered the boat in and dropped the oars, letting it glide till he reached out a hand and took hold of the dock. Lori hopped out, secured the painter to the near post, and then, without a word, walked right past Joanie and headed up the path for the house.

  He couldn’t make out his wife’s face beneath the brim of the hat, and that was just as well because he was unprepared for whatever this was or might be, not to mention a bit awkward getting out of the boat, which lurched away from him at the last minute so that he had to snatch at the post to steady himself. The dock trembled down the length of it; the boat shot out and jerked back again. “Jesus,” he said, more to himself than her, and then he was standing over her, conscious suddenly of how red his feet and legs were.