T. Boyle: T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

Of course the little fag had been holding one out in front of him all along, as if it were a portable potty or something, but the cigarette was just a glowing stub now, the tiny fag end of a cigarette — fag end, how about that? — and Jason reached out, crushed the thing in the ashtray and said, “Hey, thanks, dude — even though it really wasn’t a cigarette but just the fag end of one.”

And then Paula was there, her fourth plate of the evening mounded high with angel hair, three-bean salad, and wedges of fruit in five different colors. “So what was that all about? Your cigarette?”

Jason ignored her, forking up spaghetti. He took a long swig of his beer and shrugged. “Yeah, whatever,” he said finally. “One more fascist doing his job.”

“Don’t be like that,” she said, using the heel of her bread to round up stray morsels on her plate.

“Like what?”

“You know what I mean. I don’t have to lecture you.”

“Yeah?” He let his eyes droop. “So what do you call this then?”

She sighed and looked away, and that sigh really irritated him, rankled him, made him feel like flipping the table over and sailing a few plates through the window. He was drunk. Or three-quarters drunk anyway. Then her lips were moving again. “Everybody in the world doesn’t necessarily enjoy breathing through a tube of incinerated tobacco, you know,” she said. “People are into health.”

“Who? You maybe. But the rest of them just want to be a pain in the ass. They just want to abrogate my rights in a public place”—abrogate, now where did that come from? — “and then rub my nose in it.” The thought soured him even more, and when he caught the waitperson pussyfooting by out of the corner of his eye he snapped his fingers with as much pure malice as he could manage. “Hey, dude, another beer here, huh? I mean, when you get a chance.”

It was then that Zinny Bauer made her appearance. She stalked through the door like something crossbred in an experimental laboratory, so rangy and hollow-eyed and fleshless she looked as if she’d been pasted onto her bones. There was a guy with her — her trainer or husband or whatever — and he was right out of an X-Men cartoon, all head and shoulders and great big beefy biceps. Jason recognized them from Houston — he’d flown down to watch Paula compete in the Houston Ironman, only to see her hit the wall in the run and finish sixth in the women’s while Zinny Bauer, the Amazing Bone Woman, took an easy first. And here they were, Zinny and Klaus — or Olaf or whoever — here in the Pasta Bowl, carbo-loading like anybody else. His beer came, cold and dependable, green in the bottle, pale amber in the glass, and he downed it in two gulps. “Hey, Paula,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the quick sharp stab of joy out of his voice — he was happy suddenly and he didn’t know why. “Hey, Paula, you see who’s here?”

—

The thing that upset her was that he’d lied to her, the way her father used to lie to her mother, the same way — casually, almost as a reflex. It wasn’t his birthday at all. He’d just said that to get her out because he was drunk and he didn’t care if she had to compete the day after tomorrow and needed her rest and peace and quiet and absolutely no stimulation whatever. He was selfish, that was all, selfish and unthinking. And then there was the business with the cigarette — he knew as well as anybody in the state that there was an ordinance against smoking in public places as of January last, and still he had to push the limits like some cocky immature chip-on-the-shoulder surfer. Which is exactly what he was. But all that was forgivable — it was the Zinny Bauer business she just couldn’t understand.

Paula wasn’t even supposed to be there. She was supposed to be at home, making up a batch of flapjacks and penne with cheese sauce and lying inert on the couch with the remote control. This was the night before the night before the event, a time to fuel up her tanks and veg out. But because of him, because of her silver-tongued hero in the baggy shorts, she was at the Pasta Bowl, carbo-loading in public. And so was Zinny Bauer, the last person on earth she wanted to see.

That was bad enough, but Jason made it worse, far worse — Jason made it into one of the most excruciating moments of her life. What happened was purely crazy, and if she hadn’t known Jason better she would have thought he’d planned it. They were squabbling over his cigarette and how unlaid-back and uptight the whole thing had made him — he was drunk, and she didn’t appreciate him when he was drunk, not at all — when his face suddenly took on a conspiratorial look and he said, “Hey, Paula, you see who’s here?”

“Who?” she said, and she shot a glance over her shoulder and froze: it was Zinny Bauer and her husband Armin. “Oh, shit,” she said, and she lowered her head and focused on her plate as if it were the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. “She didn’t see me, did she? We’ve got to go. Right now. Right this minute.”

Jason was smirking. He looked happy about it, as if he and Zinny Bauer were old friends. “But you’ve only had four plates, babe,” he said. “You sure we got our money’s worth? I could go for maybe just a touch more pasta — and I haven’t even had any salad yet.”

“No joking around, this isn’t funny.” Her voice withered in her throat. “I don’t want to see her. I don’t want to talk to her. I just want to get out of here, okay?”

His smile got wider. “Sure, babe, I know how you feel — but you’re going to beat her, you are, no sweat. You don’t have to let anybody chase you out of your favorite restaurant in your own town — I mean, that’s not right, is it? That’s not in the spirit of friendly competition.”

“Jason,” she said, and she reached across the table and took hold of his wrist. “I mean it. Let’s get out of here. Now.”

Her throat was constricted, as if everything she’d eaten was about to come up. Her legs ached, and her ankle — the one she’d sprained last spring — felt as if someone had driven a nail through it. All she could think of was Zinny Bauer, with her long muscles and the shaved blond stubble of her head and her eyes that never quit. Zinny Bauer was behind her, at her back, right there, and it was too much to bear. “ Jason, ” she hissed.

“Okay, okay,” he was saying, and he tipped back the dregs of his beer and reached into his pocket and scattered a couple of rumpled bills across the table by way of a tip. Then he rose from the chair with a slow drunken grandeur and gave her a wink as if to indicate that the coast was clear. She got up, hunching her shoulders as if she could compress herself into invisibility and stared down at her feet as Jason took her arm and led her across the room — if Zinny saw her, Paula wouldn’t know about it because she wasn’t going to look up, and she wasn’t going to make eye contact, she wasn’t.

Or so she thought.

She was concentrating on her feet, on the black-and-white checked pattern of the floor tiles and how her running shoes negotiated them as if they were attached to somebody else’s legs, when all of a sudden Jason stopped and her eyes flew up and there they were, hovering over Zinny Bauer’s table like casual acquaintances, like neighbors on their way to a P.T.A. meeting. “But aren’t you Zinny Bauer?” Jason said, his voice gone high and nasal as he shifted into his Valley Girl imitation. “The great triathlete? Oh, God, yes, yes, you are, aren’t you? Oh, God, could I have your autograph for my little girl?”

Paula was made of stone. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink her eyes. And Zinny — she looked as if her plane had just crashed. Jason was playing out the charade, pretending to fumble through his pockets for a pen, when Armin broke the silence. “Why don’t you just fock off,” he said, and the veins stood out in his neck.