T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

by T. C. Boyle

  It was during this time of close scrutiny that he began to detect certain small imperfections in his bride-to-be. Despite her education, for instance, she seemed to have inordinate difficulty in making change or reading off the menu from the chalkboard on the wall behind her. She’d begun to put on weight too, picking at bits of doughnut or fried potatoes the customers left on their plates. If she’d been substantial when Baldasare first laid eyes on her, she was much more than that now—stout, actually. As stout as Signora Cardino back home in Messina, who was said to drink olive oil instead of wine and breakfast on sugared cream and cake. And then there were her eyes—or rather, her right eye. It had a cast in it, and how he’d missed that on the day he was first smitten, he couldn’t say. But he had to look twice to notice the hairs on her chin—as stiff as a cat’s whiskers and just as translucent—and as far as he was concerned, the red blotches that had begun to appear on the perfect skin of her hands and throat might have been nothing more than odd splashes of marinara sauce, as if she’d gotten too close to the pot.

  Another lover, less blinded by the light of certitude than Baldasare, might have found these blemishes a liability, but Baldasare treasured them. They were part of her, part of that quiddity that made her unique among women. He watched with satisfaction as her hips and buttocks swelled so that even at nineteen she had to walk with a waddle, looked on with a soaring heart as the blotches spread from her throat to her cheeks and brow and her right eye stared out of her head, across the room and out the window, surer each day that she was his. After all, who else would see in her what he saw? Who else could love her the way he did? Who but Baldasare Forestiere would come forward to declare himself? And he would declare himself soon—as soon as he finished digging.

  —

  Two years passed. He worked for other men and saved every cent of his wages, worse than any miser, and in his free time, he dug. When he completed a passage or a room or carved his way to the sky for light, he could already see the next passage and the next room beyond that. He had a vision, yes, and he had Ariadne to think of, but even so, he wasn’t the sort to sit around idle. He didn’t have the gift of letters, he didn’t play violin or mouth organ, and he rarely visited among his neighbors. The vaudeville theater was a long way off, too far to walk, and he went there only once, with Lucca Albanese, a vineyard worker with whom he’d struck up a friendship. There were comedians and jugglers and pretty women all dancing like birds in flight, but all the while he was regretting the two cents the streetcar had cost him and the fifteen-cent admission, and he never went back. No, he stayed home with his shovel and his vision, and many days he didn’t know morning from night.

  Saturdays, though, he kept sacred. Saturday was the day he walked the three and a half miles to Siagris’ Drugstore, through winter rains and summer heat that reached a hundred and sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. He prided himself on his constancy, and he was pleased to think that Ariadne looked forward to his weekly visits as much as he did. His place at the end of the counter was always vacant, as if reserved for him, and he relished the little smiles with which she greeted him and the sweet flow of familiar phrases that dropped so easily from her supple American lips: “So how’ve you been?” “Nice day.” “Think it’s coming on to rain?”

  As time went on, they became increasingly intimate. She told him of her uncle’s back pain, the illness of her cat, the ascension of her oldest brother to assistant floor supervisor at the Chicago Iron Works, and he told her of his ranch and of the elegance and spaciousness of his living quarters. “Twelve room,” he said. “Twelve room, and all to myself.” And then came the day when he asked her, in his runaway English, if she would come with him to the ranch for a picnic. “But not just the picnic,” he said, “but also the scene, how do you say, the scene of the place, and my, my house, because I want—I need—you see, I . . .”

  She was leaning over the counter, splotchy and huge. Her weight had stabilized in the past year—she’d reached her full growth, finally, at the age of twenty-one—and she floated above her feet like one of the airships the Germans so prized. “Yes,” she said, and she giggled and sneezed, a big mottled hand pressed to her mouth, “I’d love to.”

  The following Sunday he came for her, lightly ascending the sun-bleached steps to the walkup above the drugstore where she lived with uncle and aunt and their five children. It was a hot September morning, all of Fresno and the broad dusty valley beyond held in the grip of something stupendous, a blast of air so sere and scorching you would have thought the whole world was a pizza oven with the door open wide. Siagris the Greek answered his knock. He was in his shirtsleeves and the sweat had made a washcloth of his garments, the white field of his shirt stuck like a postage stamp to the bulge of his belly. He didn’t smile but he didn’t look displeased either, and Baldasare understood the look: Siagris didn’t like him, not one bit, and in other circumstances might have gone out of his way to squash him like a bug, but then he had a niece who took up space and ate like six nieces, and Baldasare could just maybe deliver him from that. “Come in,” he said, and there was Baldasare, the cave-dweller, in a room in a house two stories above the ground.

  Up here, inside, it was even hotter. The Siagris children lay about like swatted flies, and Mrs. Siagris, her hair like some wild beast clawing at her scalp, poked her head around the corner from the kitchen. It was too hot to smile, so she grimaced instead and pulled her head back out of sight. And then, in the midst of this suffocating scene, the voice of a ventriloquist cried out, “He’s here,” and Ariadne appeared in the hallway.

  She was all in white, with a hat the size of a tabletop perched atop the mighty pile of her hair. He was melting already, from the heat, but when she focused her wild eye on him and turned up her lips in the shyest of smiles, he melted a little more.

  Outside, in the street, she gave him her arm, which was something of a problem because she was so much taller than he was, and he had to reach up awkwardly to take it. He was wearing his best suit of clothes, washed just the evening before, and the unfamiliar jacket clung to him like dead skin while the new celluloid collar gouged at his neck and the tie threatened to throttle him. They managed to walk the better part of a block before she put her feet together and came to a halt. “Where’s your carriage?” she asked.

  Carriage? Baldasare was puzzled. He didn’t have any carriage—he didn’t even have a horse. “I no got,” he said, and he strained to give her his best smile. “We walk.”

  “Walk?” she echoed. “In this heat? You must be crazy.”

  “No,” he said, “we walk,” and he leaned forward and exerted the most delicate but insistent pressure on the monument of her arrested arm.

  Her cheeks were splotched under the crisp arc of shadow the hat brim threw over her face and her olive eyes seemed to snatch at his. “You mean,” and her voice was scolding and intemperate, “you ain’t even got a wagon? You, with your big house you’re always telling me about?”

  The following Sunday, though it wounded him to throw his money away like some Park Avenue millionaire, he pulled up to Siagris’ Drugstore in a hired cabriolet. It was a clear day, the sun high and merciless, and the same scenario played itself out in the walkup at the top of the stairs, except that this time Baldasare seemed to have things in hand. He was as short with Siagris as Siagris was with him, he made a witticism regarding the heat for the benefit of the children, and he led Ariadne (who had refused the previous week to go farther than a bench in the park at the end of the street) out the door, down the steps, and into the carriage like a cavaliere of old.

  Baldasare didn’t like horses. They were big and crude and expensive and they always seemed to need grooming, shoeing, doctoring, and oats—and the horse attached to the cabriolet was no exception. It was a stupid, flatulent, broad-flanked, mouse-colored thing, and it did its utmost to resist every touch of the reins and thwart every desire of the man wielding them. Baldasare was in a s
weat by the time they reached his property, every square inch of his clothing soaked through like a blotter, and his nerves were frayed raw. Nor had he made any attempt at conversation during the drive, so riveted was he on the task at hand, and when they finally pulled up in the shade of his favorite oak, he turned to Ariadne and saw that she hadn’t exactly enjoyed the ride either.

  Her hat was askew, her mouth set in a thin unyielding line. She was glistening with sweat, her hands like doughballs fried in lard, and a thin integument of moistened dust clung to her features. She gave him a concentrated frown. “Well, where is it?” she demanded. “Why are we stopping here?”

  His tongue ran ahead of him, even as he sprang down from the carriage and scurried to her side to assist her in alighting. “This is what I have want for to show you, and so long, because—well, because I am making it for you.”

  He studied the expression of her face as she looked from the disreputable shack to the hummock of the well and out over the heat-blasted scrub to where the crown of his avocado tree rose out of the ground like an illusion. And then she saw the ramp leading down to the cellar. She was stunned, he could see it in her face and there was no denying it, but he watched her struggle to try on a smile and focus her eyes on his. “This is a prank, ain’t it? You’re just fooling with me and your house is really over there behind that hill”—pointing now from her perch atop the carriage—“ain’t it?”

  “No, no,” he said, “no. It’s this, you see?” And he indicated the ramp, the crown of the avocado, the bump where the inverted cone of a new atrium broke the surface. “Twelve room, I tell you, twelve room.” He’d become insistent, and he had his hand on her arm, trying to lead her down from the carriage—if only she would come, if only she would see—and he wanted to tell her how cool and fresh-smelling it was down there beneath the earth, and how cheap it was to build and expand, to construct a nursery, a sewing room, anything she wanted. All it took was a strong back and a shovel, and not one cent wasted on nails and lumber and shingles that fell apart after five years in the sun. He wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come, and he tried to articulate it all through the pressure of his hand on her arm, tugging, as if the whole world depended on her getting down from that carriage—and it did, it did!

  “Let go!” she cried, snatching her arm away, and then she was sobbing, gasping for breath as if the superheated air were some other medium altogether and she was choking on it. “You said . . . you said . . . twelve rooms!”

  He tried to reach for her again—“Please,” he begged, “please”—but she jerked back from him so violently the carriage nearly buckled on its springs. Her face was furious, streaked with tears and dirt. “You bully!” she cried. “You Guinea, Dago, Wop! You, you’re no better than a murderer!”

  Three days later, in a single paragraph set off by a black border, the local paper announced her engagement to Hiram Broadbent, of Broadbent’s Poultry & Eggs.

  —

  An engagement wasn’t a marriage, that’s what Baldasare was thinking when Lucca Albanese gave him the news. An engagement could be broken, like a promise or a declaration or even a contract. There was hope yet, there had to be. “Who is this Hiram Broadbent?” he demanded. “Do you know him?”

  They were sharing a meal of beans and vermicelli in Baldasare’s subterranean kitchen, speaking in a low tragic Italian. Lucca had just read the announcement to him, the sharp-edged English words shearing at him like scissors, and the pasta had turned to cotton wadding in his throat. He was going to choke. He was going to vomit.

  “Yeah, sure,” Lucca said. “I know him. Big, fat man. Wears a straw hat winter and summer. He’s a drunk, mean as the devil, but his father owns a chicken farm that supplies all the eggs for the local markets in Fresno, so he’s always got money in his pocket. Hell, if you ever came out of your hole, you’d know who I’m talking about.”

  “You don’t think—I mean, Ariadne wouldn’t really . . . would she?”

  Lucca ducked his head and worked his spoon in the plate. “You know what my father used to say? When I was a boy in Catania?”

  “No, what?”

  “There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

  But that didn’t matter to Baldasare—he wanted only one fish. Ariadne. Why else had he been digging, if not for her? He’d created an underground palace, with the smoothest of corners and the most elegant turnings and capacious courtyards, just to give her space, to give her all the room she could want after having to live at her uncle’s mercy in that cramped walkup over the drugstore. Didn’t she complain about it all the time? If only she knew, if only she’d give him a chance and descend just once into the cool of the earth, he was sure she’d change her mind, she had to.

  There was a problem, though. An insurmountable problem. She wouldn’t see him. He came into the drugstore, hoping to make it all up to her, to convince her that he was the one, the only one, and she backed away from the counter, exchanged a word with her uncle, and melted away through the sun-struck mouth of the back door. Siagris whirled round like some animal startled in a cave, his shoulders hunched and his head held low. “We don’t want you in here anymore, understand?” he said. There was the sizzle of frying, the smell of onions, tuna fish, a row of startled white faces staring up from pie and coffee. Siagris leaned into the counter and made his face as ugly as he could. “Capiche?”

  Baldasare Forestiere was not a man to be easily discouraged. He thought of sending her a letter, but he’d never learned to write, and the idea of having someone write it for him filled him with shame. For the next few days he brooded over the problem, working all the while as a hired laborer, shoveling, lifting, pulling, bending, and as his body went through the familiar motions his mind was set free to achieve a sweated lucidity. By the end of the third day, he’d decided what he had to do.

  That night, under cover of darkness, he pushed his wheelbarrow into town along the highway and found his way to the vacant lot behind the drugstore. Then he started digging. All night, as the constellations drifted in the immensity overhead until one by one they fled the sky, Baldasare plied his shovel, his pick, and his rake. By morning, at first light, the outline of his message was clearly visible from the second-story window of the walkup above the store. It was a heart, a valentine, a perfectly proportioned symbol of his love dug three feet deep in the ground and curving gracefully over the full area of what must have been a quarter-acre lot.

  When the outline was finished, Baldasare started on the interior. In his mind’s eye, he saw a heart-shaped crater there in the lot, six feet deep at least, with walls as smooth as cement, a hole that would show Ariadne the depth of the vacancy she’d left in him. He was coming up the ramp he’d shaped of earth with a full wheelbarrow to spread over the corners of the lot, when he glanced up to see Siagris and two of his children standing there peering down at him. Siagris’ hands were on his hips. He looked more incredulous than anything else. “What in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?” he sputtered.

  Baldasare, swinging wide with his load of dirt so that Siagris and the children had to take a quick step back, never even hesitated. He just kept going to a point in the upper corner of the frame where he was dumping and raking out the dirt. “Digging,” he said over his shoulder.

  “But you can’t. This is private property. You can’t just dig up people’s yards, don’t you know that? Eh? Don’t you know anything?”

  Baldasare didn’t want a confrontation. He was a decent man, mild and pacifistic, but he was determined too. As he came by again with the empty wheelbarrow and eased it down the ramp, he said, “Tell her to look. She is the one. For her, I do this.”

  After that, he was deaf to all pleas, threats, and remonstrations, patiently digging, shoring up his walls, spreading his dirt. The sun climbed in the sky. He stopped only to take an occasional drink from a jug of water or to sit on his overturned wheelbarrow and silently eat a s
andwich from a store of them wrapped in butcher’s paper. He worked through the day, tireless, and though the sheriff came and threatened him, even the sheriff couldn’t say with any certainty who owned the lot Baldasare was defacing—couldn’t say, that is, without checking the records down at the courthouse, which he was going to do first thing in the morning, Baldasare could be sure of that. Baldasare didn’t respond. He just kept digging.

  It began to get dark. Baldasare had cleared the entire cutout of his heart to a depth of three feet, and he wasn’t even close to quitting. Six feet, he was thinking, that’s what it would take, and who could blame him if he kept glancing up at the unrevealing window of the apartment atop the drugstore in the hope of catching a glimpse of his inamorata there? If she was watching, if she knew what he was doing for love of her, if she saw the lean muscles of his arms strain and his back flex, she gave no sign of it. Undeterred, Baldasare dug on.

  And then there came a moment, and it must have been past twelve at night, the neighborhood as silent as the grave and Baldasare working by the light of a waxing moon, when two men appeared at the northern edge of the excavation, right where the lobes of the heart came together in a graceful loop. “Hey, Wop,” one of them yelled down to where Baldasare stood with his shovel, “I don’t know who you think you are, but you’re embarrassing my fiancée, and I mean to put an end to it.”