T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

Cole went in without knocking, and I followed. Through a hallway and into the kitchen, obladi oblada life goes on bra! There were two women there — girls — rising up from the table in the kitchen with loopy grins to wrap their arms around Cole, and then, after the briefest of introductions—“This is my friend, John, he’s a professor ”—to embrace me too. They were sisters, both tall, with the requisite hair parted in the middle and trailing down their shoulders. Suzie, the younger, darker and prettier one, and JoJo, two years older, with hair the color of rust before it flakes. There was a Baggie of pot on the table, a pipe and what looked to be half a bar of halvah candy but wasn’t candy at all. Joss sticks burned among the candles that lit the room. A cat looked up sleepily from a pile of newspaper in the corner. “You want to get high?” JoJo asked, and I was charmed instantly — here she was, the consummate hostess — and a portion of my uncertainty and awkwardness went into retreat.

I looked to Cole, and we both laughed, and this was a laugh of the same quality and flavor as the one we’d shared in the car.

“What?” Suzie said, leaning back against the stove now, grinning wide. “Oh, I get it — you’re already stoned, both of you, right? High as kites, right?”

From the living room — the door was closed and I had to presume it was the living room — there was the sudden screech of the needle lifting off the record, then the superamplified rasp of its dropping down again, and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” came at us once more. JoJo saw my quizzical look and paused in putting the match to the pipe. “Oh, that’s Mike — my boyfriend? He’s like obsessed with that song.”

I don’t know how much time slid by before the door swung open — we were just sitting there at the table, enveloped in the shroud of our own consciousness, the cat receding into the corner that now seemed half a mile away, candles flickering and sending insubstantial shadows up the walls. I turned round to see Mike standing in the doorframe, wearing the strap of his bass like a bandolier over a shirtless chest. He was big, six feet and something, two hundred pounds, and he was built, pectorals and biceps sharply defined, a stripe of hard blue vein running up each arm, but he didn’t do calisthenics or lift weights or anything like that — it was just the program of his genes. His hair was long, longer than either of the women’s. He wore a Fu Manchu mustache. He was sweating. “That was hot,” he said, “that was really hot.”

JoJo looked up vacantly. “What,” she said, “you want me to turn down the heat?”

He gave a laugh and leaned into the table to pluck a handful of popcorn out of a bowl that had somehow materialized there. “No, I mean the— Didn’t you hear me? That last time? That was hot, that’s what I’m saying.”

It was only then that we got around to introductions, he and Cole swapping handclasps, and then Cole cocking a finger at me. “He’s a professor,” he said.

Mike took my hand — the soul shake, a pat on the shoulder — and stood there looking bemused. “A professor?” he said. “No shit?”

I was too stoned to parse all the nuances of the question, but still the blood must have risen to my face. “A teacher,” I corrected. “You know, just to beat the draft? Like because if you—” and I went off on some disconnected monologue, talking because I was nervous, because I wanted to fit in, and I suppose I would have kept on talking till the sun came up but for the fact that everyone else had gone silent and the realization of it suddenly hit me.

“No shit?” Mike repeated, grinning in a dangerous way. He was swaying over the table, alternately feeding popcorn into the slot of his mouth and giving me a hooded look. “So how old are you — what, nineteen, twenty?”

“Twenty-one. I’ll be twenty-two in December.”

There was more. It wasn’t an inquisition exactly — Cole at one point spoke up for me and said, “He’s cool”—but a kind of scientific examination of this rare bird that had mysteriously turned up at the kitchen table. What did I think? I thought Cole should ease up on the professor business — as I got to know him I realized he was inflating me in order to inflate himself — and that we should all smoke some of the hash, though I wasn’t the host here and hadn’t brought anything to the party.

Eventually, we did smoke — that was what this was all about, community, the community of mind and spirit and style — and we moved into the living room where the big speakers were to listen to the heartbeat of the music and feel the world settle in around us. There were pillows scattered across the floor, more cats, more incense, ShopRite cola and peppermint tea in heavy homemade mugs and a slow sweet seep of peace. I propped my head against a pillow, stretched my feet out before me. The music was a dream, and I closed my eyes and entered it.

A WEEK OR TWO later my mother asked me to meet her after work at a bar / restaurant called the Hollander. This was a place with pretensions to grander things, where older people — people my mother’s age — came to drink Manhattans and smoke cigarettes and feel elevated over the crowd that frequented taverns with sawdust on the floors, the sort of places my father favored. Teachers came to the Hollander, lawyers, people who owned car dealerships and dress shops. My mother was a secretary, my father a bus driver. And the Hollander was an ersatz place, with pompous waiters and a fake windmill out front.

She was at the bar, smoking, sitting with a skinny white-haired guy I didn’t recognize, and as I came up to them I realized he could have been my father’s double, could have been my father, but he wasn’t. There were introductions — his name was Jerry Reilly and he was a teacher just like me — and a free beer appeared at my elbow, but I couldn’t really fathom what was going on here or why my mother would want me to join her in a place like this. I played it cool, ducked my head and answered Jerry Reilly’s interminable questions about school as best I could— Yeah, sure, I guess I liked it; it was better than being executed in Vietnam, wasn’t it? — without irritating him to the point at which I would miss out on a free dinner, but all I wanted to do was get out of there and meet Cole at the cottage in the woods. As expeditiously as possible. Dinner down, goodbyes and thankyou’s on file, and out the door and into the car.

That wasn’t how it worked out. Something was in the air and I couldn’t fathom what it was. I kept looking at Jerry Reilly, with his cuff links and snowy collar and whipcord tie and thinking, No, no way — my mother wouldn’t cheat on my father, not with this guy . But her life and what she did with it was a work in progress, as unfathomable to me as my own life must have been to my students — and tonight’s agenda was something else altogether, something that came in the form of a very special warning, specially delivered. We were on our third drink, seated in the dining room now, eating steak all around, though my mother barely touched hers and Jerry Reilly just pushed his around the plate every time I lifted my eyes to look at him. “Listen, John,” my mother said finally, “I just wanted to say something to you. About Cole.”

All the alarm bells went off simultaneously in my head. “Cole?” I echoed.

She gave me a look I’d known all my life, the one reserved for missteps and misdeeds. “He has a record.”

So that was it. “What’s it to you?”

My mother just shrugged. “I just thought you ought to know, that’s all.”

“I know. Of course I know. And it’s nothing, believe me — a case of mistaken identity. They got the wrong guy is all.” The fact was that Cole had been busted for selling marijuana to an undercover agent and they were trying to make a felony out of it even as his mother leaned on a retired judge she knew to step in and squash it. I put on a look of offended innocence. “So what’d you do, hire a detective?”