T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT, of course, is just another kind of wreckage. It wasn’t as immediate maybe as turning over a car or driving it into the trees, but it cut just as wide a swath and it hurt, ultimately, beyond the capacity of any wound that can be closed with stitches. Bang up your head, it’s no problem — you’re a man, you’ll grow another one. Broken leg, crushed ribs — you’re impervious. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the emotional wrecks are the worst. You can’t see the scars, but they’re there, and they’re a long time healing.

Anyway, later that day, sunburned and sated, we all came back to our house at the end of the lane on the muddy lake, showered — individually — and ordered up take-out Chinese, which we washed down with frozen margaritas while huddling on the floor and watching a truly hilarious old black-and-white horror film on the tube. Then there came a moment when we all looked at one another — consenting adults, armored in hip — and before we knew it we were reprising the afternoon’s scenario. Finally, very late, I found my way to bed, and it was Adele, not Helen, who joined me there. To sleep.

I was stupid. I was inadequate. I was a boy playing at being a man. But the whole thing thrilled me — two women, two women at my disposal — and I never even heard Helen when she told me she wanted to break it off. “I don’t trust myself,” she said. “I don’t love him, I love you. You’re my man. This is our house.” The aluminum eyes fell away into her head and she looked older than ever, older than the mummy’s ghost, older than my mother. We were in the kitchen, staring into cups of coffee. It was a week after the restaurant had opened up again, four in the morning, impossibly hot, the night alive with the shriek of every disturbed and horny insect, and we’d just got done entertaining Kurt and Adele in the way that had become usual and I didn’t want to hear her, not a word.

“Listen,” I said, half-stoned and rubbed raw between the legs, “listen, Alien, it’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with it — you don’t want to get yourself buried in all that bourgeois shit. I mean, that’s what started the War. That’s what our parents are like. We’re above that. We are.”

The house was still. Her voice was very quiet. “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly and definitively, “no we’re not.”

A MONTH WENT BY, and nothing changed. Then another. The days began to grow shorter, the nights took on a chill and the monster in the basement clanked and rumbled into action, devouring fuel oil once again. I was tending bar one night at the end of September, maybe twenty customers sitting there staring at me, Jimmy Brennan and a few of his buddies at the end of the bar, couples lingering over the tables, when the phone rang. It had been a slow night — we’d only done maybe fifty dinners — but the bar had filled up after we shut the kitchen down, and everybody seemed unnaturally thirsty. Helen had gone home early, as had Adele and Kurt, and I was getting drinks at the bar and taking orders at the tables too. I picked the phone up on the second ring. “Brennan’s,” I said, “how can I help you?”

It was Helen. Her voice was thick, gritty, full of something I hadn’t heard in it before. “That you, Les?” she said.

“Yeah, what’s up?” I pinned the phone to one shoulder with my chin to keep my hands free, and began dipping glasses in the rinse water and stacking them to dry. I kept my eyes on the customers.

“I just wanted to tell you I’m moving out.”

I watched Jimmy Brennan light a cigarette and lean out over the bar to fetch himself an ashtray. I caught his eye and signaled “just a minute,” then turned my back to the bar. “What do you mean?” I said, and I had to whisper. “What are you saying?”

“What am I saying? You want to know what I’m saying, Les — do you really?” There it was, the grit in her voice, and more than that — anger, hostility. “What I’m saying is I’m moving in with Kurt and Adele because I’m in love with Kurt. You understand that? You understand what I’m saying? It’s over. Totally. Adioski.”

“Sure,” I whispered, and I was numb, no more capable of thought or feeling than the empty beer mug I was turning over in my hands, “—if that’s what you want. But when, I mean, when are you—?”

There was a pause, and I thought I heard her catch her breath, as if she were fighting back the kind of emotion I couldn’t begin to express. “I won’t be there when you get home,” she said.

Somebody was calling me—“Hey, bartender!”—and I swung round on a big stupid-looking guy with a Fu Manchu mustache who came in every night for two or three drinks and never left more than a quarter tip. “Another round here, huh?”

“And, Les,” she was saying through that cold aperture molded to my ear like a compress, “the rent’s only paid through the thirtieth, so I don’t know what you’re going to do—”

“Hey, bartender!”

“—and you know what, Les? I don’t care. I really don’t.”

I stayed late that night. The bar was alive, roaring, seething with camaraderie, chaos, every kind of possibility. My friends were there, my employer, customers I saw every night and wanted to embrace. I drank everything that came my way. I went out to the kitchen and smoked a joint with the busboys. Muddy Waters thumped through the speakers with his mojo workin’ (“All you womens, stand in line, / I’ll make love to you, babe, / In five minutes’ time, / Ain’t that a man?”). I talked a couple of people comatose, smoked a whole pack of cigarettes. Then came the moment I’d been dreading since I’d hung up the phone — Jimmy Brennan got up off his barstool and shut down the lights and it was time to go home.

Outside, the sky seemed to rise up out of itself and pull the stars taut like separate strands of hair till everything blurred and there was no more fire, just ice. It was cold. My breath steamed in the sick yellow glow of the streetlights. I must have stood in the empty parking lot for a full five minutes before I realized Helen had the van — her van — and I had no way to get home and nobody to call. But then I heard a noise behind me, the rattle of keys, a slurred curse, and there was Jimmy Brennan, locking up, and I shouted, “Jimmy, hey, Jimmy, how about a ride?” He looked puzzled, as if the pavement had begun to speak, but the light caught the discs of his glasses and something like recognition slowly transformed his face. “Sure,” he said, unsteady on his feet, “sure, no problem.”

He drove like a zombie, staring straight ahead, the radio tuned so low all I could hear was the dull muted snarl of the bass. We didn’t say much, maybe nothing at all. He had his problems, and I had mine. He let me off at the end of the dark lane and I fumbled my way into the dark house and fled away to unconsciousness before I could think to turn the lights on.

Two days later I put down five hundred dollars on a used Dodge the color of dried blood and moved in with Phil Cherniske, one of the waiters at Brennan’s, who by a cruel stroke of fate happened to live on the next street over from the one I’d just vacated, right on the shore of the same muddy lake. Phil’s place stank of mouseshit too, and of course it lacked the feminine touches I’d grown accustomed to and cleanliness wasn’t all that high on the list of priorities, but who was I to complain? It was a place in which to breathe, sleep, shit, brood and get stoned.

In the meanwhile, I tried to get hold of Helen. She’d quit Brennan’s the day after our phone conversation, and when I called Kurt and Adele’s, she refused to talk to me. Adele wouldn’t say a word the next day at work and it was awkward in the extreme going through an eight-hour shift behind the bar with Kurt, no matter how hip and impervious I tried to be. We dodged round each other a hundred times, made the smallest of small talk, gave elaborate consideration to customers at the far end of the bar. I wanted to kill him, that’s what I wanted to do, and I probably would have too, except that violence was so unhip and immature. Helen’s name never passed my lips. I froze Kurt out. And Adele too. And to everybody else I was a combination of Mahatma Gandhi and Santa Claus, my frozen smile opening up into a big slobbering insincere grin. “Hey, man,” I said to the cheapazoid with the mustache, “how you doin’?”