Outside Looking In

by T. C. Boyle

  She looked up at him now, her face tight with anger. “I hope you had a nice time,” she said, and that left him without an opening, because he was going to say Hi, say What are you reading?, say What a day, huh?

  “Yeah,” he said, “it was great. We just happened to come down here and see the boat—and it was such an amazing day . . . I felt like I was twelve years old again, like Huck Finn out on his raft.”

  She didn’t bother to respond. She said only, “We’re going to New Jersey next week. As soon as school’s out.”

  “New Jersey? What about the party, what about the Fourth?”

  She spun round, put her legs under her and came up so fast he had to take a step back just to get out of her way, and there she was, right in his face. “Parties. I’ve had it with parties. With everything. With this whole place. It’s destroying us, Fitz, and it’s destroying Corey too. Jackie’s a bad influence, and you know it. Nancy, for Christ’s sake—”

  He wasn’t thinking clearly, but what she was saying was wrong, so very wrong. This wasn’t about Corey or Jackie either—it was about Ken, it was about Fanchon, it was about Lori. He said, “I’m not going.”

  And that was it, that was the moment that led inevitably to this one, to the buzz of the lawn mower as it tore at the tall grass and the downed branches that weren’t supposed to be there while Joanie, all the way across the yard and up the stairs in the shadowy theater of their room, put things in suitcases and paper bags and carried them down to the station wagon that was going to take her and his son to the Jersey Shore. For the summer. Just for the summer. And he didn’t really need to say goodbye to Corey at this point because he was busy now and everything in the world was very bright and present and he’d already done that three nights in succession and assured him he’d be there as soon as he could get away—after the party, after the party for sure—and that they’d go crabbing and take his grandfather’s boat out to fish for stripers and blues the way they used to.

  He was running sweat. He could taste the salt at the corners of his mouth, his own salt, the salt his body took in daily and daily expelled, and felt the sting of it in his eyes. Grasshoppers arced across his field of vision, the grass flattened and yielded. He kept going, kept pushing, working furiously toward a self-imposed terminus, which would coincide with the moment the station wagon rolled off down the drive and disappeared through the gate, and he wasn’t going to look up, he promised himself that, because if he looked up it would confuse things in a way that was going to be hurtful to all parties concerned. He and Joanie had already said what they had to say and he’d made his pledges and taken his vows and gotten a reprieve at least for now, at least till the party was over, and then he’d catch a train or a bus or get Charlie or Rick to drive him . . .

  His back was to the house and if somebody was calling his name he couldn’t really hear it over the racket of the motor, but then he felt a hand on his shoulder and he swung round, startled, to see Corey standing there in a mad explosion of sunlight and the car, the station wagon, idling in the drive behind him. He shut off the mower, and all the sounds of the day—his coworkers’ voices, birdsong, the drone of an airplane high overhead—came rushing back to him. “Dad,” Corey was saying, “Dad, we’re leaving now.”

  He was looking into his son’s face but he couldn’t see anything there beyond the impact of the moment—was he frightened? Distraught? Upset over leaving his father, his friends, Nancy?

  “Listen,” he said, pausing to wipe the sweat from his hands on the damp seat of his shorts, “you be good now, okay? And I know Jersey isn’t exactly Mexico, but it’s the beach, right, and at least you’ll be out of this heat—”

  Corey didn’t seem to have anything to say to this, which was just talk, after all.

  “And the summer’ll be over before you can blink twice, right?”

  Corey’s voice was deep now, the adolescent croak all but gone, and lately, whenever he spoke, Fitz found himself momentarily baffled, as if some stranger had assumed his son’s shape and form. Corey said, “I just blinked twice. And look, here’s another one.”

  He told himself it was all for the better—a little break, that was all—and there was no need to get emotional about it, but he was getting emotional, feeling all the air go out of him as if his lungs had suddenly deflated. Never once since his son came into the world had he been away from him for more than a day or two at a time, and this wasn’t just a day or two, it was a summer, or part of a summer, and even as the thought came to him he knew he wasn’t going to go to New Jersey to sit there sweltering in that cramped house while his father-in-law baited him and his mother-in-law presided over a sheaf of newspaper clippings about Tim and Millbrook and the evils of LSD.

  “Okay,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “you take care now,” and he held out his hand and Corey took it and maybe he would have hugged him if he wasn’t so sweaty but then Corey dropped his hand and looked back to where the station wagon sat idling at the curb.

  “Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Mom?”

  He could make her out behind the wheel in shadowy silhouette. Things sparked at the edges of his vision. He was too wrought up, too sweaty—maybe he was dehydrated, maybe that was it. He almost waved, just let it go, just wave—they’d had their talk, and if he knew one thing, if he knew anything at all, he knew she’d be back—but then Corey started walking and he found himself following along, just like one of Lorenz’s geese.

  Joanie didn’t get out of the car. Her face was very small and very white and clenched like a fist. He leaned in to kiss her, but she didn’t give him her lips, only the hard slanted bone of her left cheek. “Okay, well,” he said as Corey slid into the passenger’s seat and slammed the door, “I guess this is it, then. Have a good trip, okay?”

  She didn’t say anything. Just put the car in gear and headed up the long drive lined with painted stones till she reached the gatehouse, looked both ways and turned west on Route 44.

  The party was the biggest yet, and if that presented a problem for the village police, it really wasn’t Tim’s concern. The guests had been forewarned, everybody adhered strictly to the speed limit and no one parked on the public streets, but that was as far as he was willing to go, because this was America and not some police state, right? Still, as a concession, they’d stationed a couple of the kids in the driveway waving Tibetan prayer flags to guide the cars through the gates and out onto the lawn, which had at least been cut for the occasion, thanks to Fitz, and it hadn’t rained in the past few days so that the various ruts and cross-hatchings were more or less negotiable. People arriving by taxi proceeded directly to the front door, a few appeared on foot and one party of six came all the way from the station on bicycles. By noon, there were people all over the property, some familiar, some not, but every one of them in a state of bliss over the beauty of the day and the unfolding of the sacrament and whatever else the Castalia Foundation had to offer by way of emollients, which included an open bar and what people were passing hand to hand.

  For the past two and a half weeks he’d been focusing on the preparations in a way he never had before. There were trips to the supermarket and the liquor store, the acquisition of paper plates, plastic utensils, charcoal briquettes, the rental of folding chairs, Canadian fireworks purchased on the sly, acrylic paints for the mandala he was decorating his bedroom door with and the mural he was contemplating for the ceiling over his bed, and there was always a car available and somebody who wanted to tag along. If he was sleeping alone, if Lori was elusive and back to spouting poetry and he was going deep more times than he could count, that was all the more reason to plunge in here. Joanie was at her parents’ house, at the shore, and Corey was there with her as if none of this had ever meant a thing to them. He’d spoken to her exactly once, long-distance, for exactly three minutes, and it hadn’t been a pleasant experience. The Castalia Foundation was $50,000 in debt according to the latest accounting and nobody was supposed to use the phone exce
pt for local calls, and Paulette, her face set, had let him know as much. He’d had three minutes of expressing himself in full sentences while Joanie replied in monosyllables, and no, Corey couldn’t come to the phone because he was out somewhere with his fishing pole. Love you. Yeah, love you too.

  He was wandering the halls and drifting out across the lawn and back again, a coffee mug of brandy and soda in one hand, a cigarette in the other, enjoying himself—enjoying the spectacle—when Maynard and his fourteen bandmates started up with “Blue Birdland,” a tune he’d heard before and disliked on principle, a flabby tune, a tune that had nothing to do with modern jazz and everything to do with what was unhip and uncool and tied to a dying era, and he realized the afternoon was getting on and it was time to drop his tab of acid (as people were referring to it now, verb and noun) so he’d be soaring for the fireworks.

  Two hundred people. The old guard was there, longtime friends of Tim and Dick, and a younger crowd too, a couple of the men wearing their hair long and swept across the brow, Beatles fashion. And there were girls everywhere, half of them fresh from the pool and sauntering around in bikinis, an illustration of the flesh that brought home to him all over again the fact that he was sleeping alone and hadn’t laid eyes on Lori all day. Which was maddening. This was the biggest party of the year—she knew that as well as anybody. For the past hour he’d been asking people if they’d seen her and he must have gone down to her room looking for her half a dozen times already, everything a muddle, the dogs underfoot, the monkey screeching from some hidden perch, everybody grinning in his face and pumping his hand. And Maynard. Maynard wailing away.

  He was just about to go up the steps and back into the house to check again, when he caught himself: two young women were coming up the walk, arm in arm, striding in perfect sync as if they were working the runway at a fashion show. They were wearing dresses, stockings, heels, though this was an outdoor party, a country party, with steamed corn and paper plates, but then maybe they hadn’t gotten the message—or didn’t care. And why should they? They were exquisite. And if they wanted to get down and dirty out on the back lawn, they could always take their shoes off, right? That was what he was thinking, if he was thinking at all, because he was mesmerized. One of them, the taller of the two, had a dog with her, a Pekingese with an elaborate hairdo done up in ribbons and bows, tucked like a muff under her arm. She was blond, five nine or ten even accounting for the heels, and every bit as stunning as Flora Lu, or maybe even more so—definitely more so—and she gave him a big melting smile as she passed by and strode up the steps and onto the porch, where Charlie, who was just emerging from the house, held the front door for her and her companion, then threw him a look as if to say, Did you see that?

  What neither of them realized was that this very tall girl with the Pekingese tucked under one arm and the flawless face and figure was in fact a fashion model, one who was already famous for impersonating a Viking princess standing at the prow of a ship coming up the Hudson in a television ad for Erik cigars, and that she posed a greater threat to Millbrook than all the cops in the county combined. Within minutes she would latch onto Tim, the verified celebrity among them who’d had his picture in the papers even more than she had, and within the hour they’d be doing the sacrament together, privately, in his bedroom, while Peggy pretended to be absorbed in the band and the party went on without them, and two weeks later would announce their engagement with plans for a December wedding and a six-month honeymoon in India, which left the inner circle . . . where?

  But that was the future. That was a set of circumstances he didn’t know of and couldn’t imagine as he stood there on the steps in Nena von Schlebrügge’s wake, momentarily distracted from the fact that Lori was missing and he wanted her more than all the blond fashion models in the world stacked up one atop the other till they reached the troposphere. He needed another drink. He needed the drug to come on. He needed Lori and he needed the Light—even the merest glimpse of it, because he’d settle for that if he could have Lori just for the afternoon. And the evening. And the night, especially the night.

  She wasn’t in her room. He verified that, both audibly and visually, then slipped inside, pulling the door shut behind him. The room showed hardly a trace of her, as if it were a cell in a convent. She kept her clothes in a blue nylon backpack propped up against the wall inside the closet next to a cheap straw hamper for her laundry, and no, he didn’t sift through it for the scent of her—he wasn’t that far gone, or at least that’s what he told himself. The bed was neatly made. There were a few books, poetry mostly, on a bookcase she’d constructed of cement blocks and three naked planks of pine. From beyond the window, which didn’t afford a view of the side lawn or the circus tent or the smoke of the barbecue, he could hear Maynard’s trumpet rising over the blur of the other horns and the eggbeater of the drummer’s snare and tom-toms. At some point, he couldn’t say when exactly, the exhilaration he’d felt all day began to seep out of him and he pulled back the comforter and lay down on the bed. He didn’t sleep. The drug wouldn’t allow that. He just lay still, staring at the ceiling as the ceiling went through its permutations, maps there, cities, roads, trunk lines, spur lines, housing developments, trees, canals, tunnels, bridges, New York Central, B&O, and plaster, plain opaque plaster that didn’t want to give up its secrets except in the stingiest little packets.

  Then the door swung open and Lori was there. All she had on was a bathing suit. Her hair was wet and she clutched a towel in one hand, as if she’d just come up from the pool. She didn’t seem to see him, or not at first, and she dropped the towel at her feet and went straight to the window to shut the blinds, her movements jerky and uncertain, as if she were dancing with an unseen partner. She was muttering to herself—or singing, maybe she was singing. Or reciting, that was it—she was reciting one of her poems, though the words were piling up so fast he couldn’t make any sense of them. He called her name then, softly, and she spun round on him in a panic, her eyes like holes drilled in her face, and said one thing only: “No!”

  The drug was coming up on him and if he’d begun to feel dissociated from her, from the shadows of the room and the grid of light trapped in the slats of the blinds, her voice brought him right back. This was a party. They were having a party. And here she was, at long last, right where he wanted her. He got up and tried to wrap her in his arms—to hug her, just to hug her—but she pushed away and he saw her face then, the look there, and it was the look the divinity student had given him back in Boston, Julius, the one who’d come unhinged and run out onto the street. That gave him pause. Sobered him. Lori was having a hard time, Lori was flipping out, hurting, hurting badly, and Walter Pahnke and his syringe were hundreds of miles away. “It’s okay,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t, and he reached out for her a second time, fighting through the pulsations of the drug that cut everything in half and then halved it again, but she dodged away from him, tore open the door and ran out into the hallway, screaming, “No! No! No!”

  There was a couple just outside the door, leaning against the wall sharing a cigarette, a hepcat with a fringe of goatee and a skinny girl in a white beret, and the guy said, “Hey, what’s going on?” and tried to grab hold of his arm, but Fitz ran right through him, down the hall and across the front room with everybody standing around levitating cocktails and beers and somebody—Charlie—calling, “Where’s the fire?” Lori never hesitated. She darted through the crowd, shot out the front door and down the length of the porch till she was out on the lawn and past the tent and Maynard and the seismic heave of the band building to climax, and Fitz didn’t hesitate either. He was afraid suddenly, deeply afraid, great jarring blocks of the world thundering down before him, and what if she got to the lake, what if she tried to swim, what if the water took hold of her and never let go?

  Sure enough: she was heading right for it. And though he ran as hard as he could—and harder, still harder—he was no match for her. She hurled herself down the pa
th, shoulders rotating, arms pumping, the dirty soles of her feet flashing like shuffled cards, flew across the slats of the dock in full stride and careened off the end of it and into the dark pall of the water, only to emerge an instant later, tearing the surface in a smooth coordinated crawl that already had her fifty yards out by the time he hit the water himself, his shirt and pants and shoes gone heavy in the instant, and what was the problem, why the panic, why was he chasing her? Because she wasn’t herself. Because she’d done some astronomical dose and was right there in the place Julius had been before—and Julius was only on psilocybin, a plaything compared to this—and he was afraid for her. Terrified. What if she hurt herself? What if she drowned? Could people swim on LSD? Had there been any studies? Rats, what about rats?

  He paused, treading water, to rid himself of the shoes, the pants, his shirt, the grip of the lake so cold and unforgiving, so, so . . . wet . . . and saw that there were people on the dock behind him, tranquillized people, partygoers, sacramental people, and they were all smiling and waving as if this were part of the entertainment, but where was she? There, straight out, the slash of her arms and kick of her feet and everything exploding all around him, and he was swimming now too, focusing on that distant perturbation of the water and the slick black bulb of her head that kept dipping and rising and moving farther and ever farther away from him.

  The sky went gray, then black, and then there were stars. He was flailing, chilled through, Lori lost to him and the shore receding in every direction till there was no shore, only night. Dog paddle, backstroke, breaststroke, crawl. He gulped for air. His ears were clogged and he couldn’t see where he was going, the stars there only to mock him. He swam in circles, rested, shivered, and then, just as he was descending into the core of his being, mind and body interlocked once and forever, no sacrament now, no God, no nothing, the sky sliced open and the silhouette of the shore materialized right there in front of him. There was a concussive blast, more light, color, the rockets—Canadian rockets—arcing overhead to snuff themselves in a rain of sparks. That was the very moment he felt the bottom rise up to take hold of him, weeds grappling with his legs, the suck of the mud, and then he was heaving himself up the bank and into the night so he could shiver in his mud-stained underwear and see the death’s heads grinning all around him because Lori was dead, dead and drowned, and the sacrament was flaying the flesh from his bones.