T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

“You hungry?” Denise asked while we did an awkward little dance around the gleaming island of stainless steel and tile in the middle of the kitchen. “I’ll bet you’re starved,” she said, “after all that bachelor cooking and the airplane food. And look at you — you’re shivering. He’s shivering, Philip.”

I was, and no denying it.

“You can’t run around in a T-shirt and leather jacket and expect to survive a Michigan winter — it might be all right for L.A. maybe, but not here.” She turned to Philip, who’d been standing there as if someone had crept up on him and nailed his shoes to the floor. “Philip, haven’t you got a parka for Rick? How about that blue one with the red lining you never wear anymore? And a pair of gloves, for God’s sake. Get him a pair of gloves, will you?” She came back to me then, all smiles: “We can’t have our California boy getting frostbite now, can we?”

Philip agreed that we couldn’t, and we all stood there smiling at one another till I said, “Isn’t anybody going to offer me a drink?”

Then it was my nephews — red-faced howling babies in dirty yellow diapers the last time I’d seen them, at the funeral that had left me an orphan at twenty-three, little fists glomming onto the cold cuts while drool descended toward the dip — but here they were, eight and six, edging up to me in high-tops and oversized sweatshirts while I threw back my brother’s scotch. “Hey,” I said, grinning till I thought my head would burst, “remember me? I’m your Uncle Rick.”

They didn’t remember me — how could they? — but they brightened at the sight of the two yellow bags of M&M’s peanut candies I’d thought to pick up at the airport newsstand. Josh, the eight-year-old, took the candy gingerly from my hand, while his brother looked on to see if I was going to sprout fangs and start puking up black vomit. We were all sitting around the living room, very clean, very Home & Garden, getting acquainted. Philip and Denise held on to their drinks as if they were afraid somebody was going to steal them. We were all grinning. “What’s that on your eyebrow?” Josh said.

I reached up and fingered the thin gold loop. “It’s a ring,” I said. “You know, like an earring, only it’s in my eyebrow.”

No one said anything for a long moment. Jeff, the younger one, looked as if he was going to start crying. “Why?” Josh said finally, and Philip laughed and I couldn’t help myself — I laughed too. It was all right. Everything was all right. Philip was my brother and Denise was my sister-in-law and these kids with their wide-open faces and miniature Guess jeans were my nephews. I shrugged, laughing still. “Because it’s cool,” I said, and I didn’t even mind the look Philip gave me.

Later, after I’d actually crawled into the top bunk and read the kids a Dr. Seuss story that set off all sorts of bells in my head, Philip and Denise and I discussed my future over coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls. My immediate future, that is — as in tomorrow morning, 8 a.m., at the clinic. I was going to be an entry-level drudge despite my three years of college, my musical background and family connections, rinsing out test tubes and sweeping the floors and disposing of whatever was left in the stainless-steel trays when my brother and his colleagues finished with their “procedures.”

“All right,” I said. “Fine. I’ve got no problem with that.”

Denise had tucked her legs up under her on the couch. She was wearing a striped caftan that could have sheltered armies. “Philip had a black man on full time, just till a week ago, nicest man you’d ever want to meet — and bright too, very bright — but he, uh, didn’t feel…”

Philip’s voice came out of the shadows at the end of the couch, picking up where she’d left off. “He went on to something better,” he said, regarding me steadily through the clear walls of his glasses. “I’m afraid the work isn’t all that mentally demanding — or stimulating, for that matter — but, you know, little brother, it’s a start, and, well—”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, “beggars can’t be choosers.” I wanted to add to that, to maybe soften it a bit — I didn’t want him to get the idea I wasn’t grateful, because I was — but I never got the opportunity. Just then the phone rang. I looked up at the sound — it wasn’t a ring exactly, more like a bleat, eh-eh-eh-eh-eh —and saw that my brother and his wife were staring into each other’s eyes in shock, as if a bomb had just gone off. Nobody moved. I counted two more rings before Denise said, “I wonder who that could be at this hour?” and Philip, my brother with the receding hairline and the too-big glasses and his own eponymous clinic in suburban Detroit, said, “Forget it, ignore it, it’s nobody.”

And that was strange, because we sat there in silence and listened to that phone ring over and over — twenty times, twenty times at least — until whoever it was on the other end finally gave up. Another minute ticked by, the silence howling in our ears, and then Philip stood, looked at his watch, and said, “What do you think — time to turn in?”

—

I wasn’t stupid, not particularly — no stupider than anybody else anyway — and I was no criminal either. I’d just drifted into a kind of thick sludge of hopelessness after I dropped out of school for a band I put my whole being into, a band that disintegrated within the year, and one thing led to another. Jobs came and went. I spent a lot of time on the couch, channel-surfing and thumbing through books that used to mean something to me. I found women and lost them. And I learned that a line up your nose is a dilettante’s thing, wasteful and extravagant. I started smoking, two or three nights a week, and then it was five or six nights a week, and then it was every day, all day, and why not? That was how I felt. Sure. And now I was in Michigan, starting over.

Anyway, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to understand why my brother and his wife had let that phone ring — not after Philip and I swung into the parking lot behind the clinic at seven forty-five the next morning. I wasn’t even awake, really — it was four forty-five West Coast time, an hour that gave me a headache even to imagine, much less live through. Beyond the misted-up windows, everything was gloom, a kind of frozen fog hanging in air the color of lemon ice. The trees, I saw, hadn’t sprouted leaves overnight. Every curb was a repository of frozen trash.

Philip and I had been making small talk on the way into town, very small talk, out of consideration for the way I was feeling. Denise had given me coffee, which was about all I could take at that hour, but Philip had gobbled a big bowl of bran flakes and sunflower seeds with skim milk, and the boys, shy around me all over again, spooned up Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes in silence. I came out of my daze the minute the tires hit the concrete apron separating the private property of the lot from the public space of the street: there were people there, a whole shadowy mass of shoulders and hats and steaming faces that converged on us with a shout. At first I didn’t know what was going on — I thought I was trapped in a bad movie, Night of the Living Dead or Zombies on Parade. The faces were barking at us, teeth bared, eyes sunk back in their heads, hot breath boiling from their throats. “Murderers!” they were shouting. “Nazis!” “Baby-killers!”

We inched our way across the sidewalk and into the lot, working through the mass of them as if we were on a narrow lane in a dense forest, and Philip gave me a look that explained it all, from the lines in his face to Denise’s fat to the phone that rang in the middle of the night no matter how many times he changed the number. This was war. I climbed out of the car with my heart hammering, and as the cold knife of the air cut into me I looked back to where they stood clustered at the gate, lumpish and solid, people you’d see anywhere. They were singing now. Some hymn, some self-righteous churchy Jesus-thumping hymn that bludgeoned the traffic noise and the deep-frozen air with the force of a weapon. I didn’t have time to sort it out, but I could feel the slow burn of anger and humiliation coming up in me. Philip’s hand was on my arm. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got work to do, little brother.”