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

“Hey,” her father said, lifting his head to peer over the butt of the couch, and she realized she’d been standing there watching him, “what’s up? Homework done? Need any help? How about that essay — want me to proof that essay for you? What’s it on, Madison? Or Burr. Burr, right?”

“That’s okay.”

“You sure?” His voice was slow and compacted, as if it wasn’t composed of vibrations of the vocal cords, the air passing through the larynx like in her science book, but made of something heavier, denser. He would be taking a taxi tonight, she could see that, and then maybe she— Marcy —would drive him back home. “Because I could do it, no problem. I’ve got”—and she watched him lift his watch to his face and rotate his wrist—“half an hour or so, forty-five minutes.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

She was sipping her hot chocolate and reading a story for English by William Faulkner, the author’s picture in her textbook a freeze-frame of furious eyes and conquered hair, when she heard her father’s voice riding a current down the hall, now murmurous, now pinched and electric, then dense and sluggish all over again. It took her a minute: he was reading Lisette her bedtime story. The house was utterly still and she held her breath, listening, till all of a sudden she could make out the words. He was reading Balto, a story she’d loved when she was little, when she was Lisette’s age, and as his voice came to her down the hall she could picture the illustrations: Balto, the lead dog of the sled team, radiating light from a sunburst on his chest and the snowstorm like a monstrous hand closing over him, the team fighting through the Alaskan wind and ice and temperatures of forty below zero to deliver serum to the sick children in Nome — and those children would die if Balto didn’t get through. Diphtheria. It was a diphtheria epidemic and the only plane available was broken down — or no, it had been dismantled for the winter. What’s diphtheria? she’d asked her father, and he’d gone to the shelf and pulled down the encyclopedia to give her the answer, and that was heroic in itself, because as he settled back onto her bed, Lisette snuggled up beside her and rain at the windows and the bedside lamp the only thing between them and darkness absolute, he’d said, You see, there’s everything in books, everything you could ever want.

Balto’s paws were bleeding. The ice froze between his toes. The other dogs kept holding back, but he was the lead dog and he turned on them and snarled, fought them just to keep them in their traces, to keep them going. Balto. With his harnessed shoulders and shaggy head and the furious unconquerable will that drove him all through that day and into the night that was so black there was no way of telling if they were on the trail or not.

Now, as she sat poised at the edge of her bed, listening to Lisette’s silence and her father’s limping voice, she waited for her sister to pipe up in her breathy little baby squeak and frame the inevitable questions: Dad, Dad, how cold is forty below? And: Dad, what’s diphtheria?

—

The sun had crept imperceptibly across the deck, fingering the cracks in the varnished floorboards and easing up the low brass rail Marcy was using as a backrest. She was leaning into it, the rail, her chair tipped back, her elbows splayed behind her and her legs stretched out to catch the sun, shapely legs, stunning legs, legs long and burnished and firm, legs that made him think of the rest of her and the way she was in bed. There was a scar just under the swell of her left kneecap, the flesh annealed in an irregular oval as if it had been burned or scarified, and he’d never noticed that before. Well, he was in a new place, half a glass each left of the second bottle and the world sprung to life in the fullness of its detail, everything sharpened, in focus, as if he’d needed glasses all these years and just clapped them on. The gull was gone but it had been special, a very special gull, and there were sparrows now, or wrens, hopping along the floor in little streaks of color, snatching up a crumb of this or that and then hurtling away over the rail as if they’d been launched. He was thinking he didn’t want any more wine — two bottles was plenty — but maybe something to cap off the afternoon, a cognac maybe, just one.

She’d been talking about one of the girls who worked for her, a girl he’d seen a couple of times, nineteen, soft-faced and pretty, and how she — her name was Bettina — was living the party life, every night at the clubs, and how thin she was.

“Cocaine?” he wondered, and she shrugged. “Has it affected her work?”

“No,” she said, “not yet anyway.” And then she went on to qualify that with a litany of lateness in the morning, hyper behavior after lunch and doctor’s appointments, too many doctor’s appointments. He waited a moment, watching her mouth and tongue, the beautiful unspooling way the words dropped from her lips, before he reached down and ran a finger over the blemish below her kneecap. “You have a scar,” he said.

She looked at her knee as if she wasn’t aware it was attached to her, then withdrew her leg momentarily to scrutinize it before giving it back to the sun and the deck and the waiting touch of his hand. “Oh, that?” she said. “That’s from when I was a kid.”

“A burn or what?”

“Bicycle.” She teased the syllables out, slow and sure.

His hand was on her knee, the warmth of the contact, and he rubbed the spot a moment before straightening up in the chair and draining his glass. “Looks like a burn,” he said.

“Nope. Just fell in the street.” She let out that laugh again and he drank it in. “You should’ve seen my training wheels — or the one of them. It was as flat”— flaat —“as if a truck had run me over.”

Her eyes flickered with the lingering seep of the memory and they both took a moment to picture it, the little girl with the wheel collapsed under her and the scraped knee — or it had to have been worse than that, punctured, shredded — and he didn’t think of Lisette or Angelle, not yet, because he was deep into the drift of the day, so deep there was nothing else but this deck and this slow sweet sun and the gull that was gone now. “You want something else?” he heard himself say. “Maybe a Rémy, just to cap it off? I mean, I’m wined out, but just, I don’t know, a taste of cognac?”

“Sure,” she said, “why not?” and she didn’t look at her watch and he didn’t look at his either.

And then the waiter was there with two snifters and a little square of dark chocolate for each of them, compliments of the house. Snifter, he was thinking as he revolved the glass in his hand, what a perfect designation for the thing, a name that spoke to function, and he said it aloud, “Isn’t it great that they have things like snifters, so you can stick your nose in it and sniff? And plus, it’s named for what it is, unlike, say, a napkin or a fork. You don’t nap napkins or fork forks, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, and the sun had leveled on her hair now, picking out the highlights and illuminating the lobe of one ear, “I guess. But I was telling you about Bettina? Did you know that guy she picked up I told you about — not the boyfriend, but the one-night stand? He got her pregnant.”

The waiter drifted by then, college kid, hair in his eyes, and asked if there’d be anything else. It was then that he thought to check his watch and the first little pulse of alarm began to make itself felt somewhere deep in the quiet lagoon of his brain: Angelle, the alarm said. Lisette. They had to be picked up at school after soccer practice every Wednesday because Wednesday was Allie’s day off and Martine wasn’t there to do it. Martine was in Paris, doing whatever she pleased. That much was clear. And today — today was Wednesday.