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

The man — Todd — dropped his eyes, made a noise in the back of his throat. They were silent a moment, just listening to the wind, and then the clouds closed in and the sun failed and the room grew a shade darker, two shades, and she reached for the pull on the lamp. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It must be hard.”

She didn’t answer. She studied his face, his hands, the nervous bounce of his right heel. “What I was thinking,” she said finally, “is maybe opening another bottle. Just one more glass. What do you say?”

He looked up at her with that grin, the grin resurrected in the space of a heartbeat to make everything all right again. “I don’t know,” he sighed, and he was watching her now, watching her as intently as he’d been a moment ago when he was delivering his speech, “but if I have another glass I’m going to want to lay down. How about you? You feel like laying down?”

—

For a long while Mae crouched there in the wet earth, toying with the idea of backing noiselessly across the lawn so she could slip next door to the Kaprielians’ and see if she could maybe borrow or purchase some meat — steak, rump roast, whatever they had — and she’d pay them later because this was an emergency and she couldn’t talk about it now. Meat, that was what she needed. Any kind of meat. She had a fantasy of dropping wet slabs of it across the lawn in a discontinuous path that snaked up the gravel walk and through the open door of the garage, the big cat lured inside where it would settle down to sleep over a full belly between the dryer and the Toyota. But no. She hardly knew the Kaprielians. And what she did know of them she didn’t like, the husband a big-bellied inimical presence bent perpetually over the hood of his hot rod or whatever it was and the wife dressed like some sort of hooker even in the morning when she went out to the driveway to retrieve the newspaper….

She didn’t believe in meat and neither did Doug. That was one of the things that had attracted her to him, one of the things they had in common, though there were other things — mountains of them, replete with ridges and declensions and towering heights — in which they were polar opposites. But Doug had worked two summers in a chicken plant in Tennessee, snatching the chickens up out of their cages to suspend them on a cable by their clamped feet so they could proceed to the pluckers and gutters, and he’d vowed never again to touch a piece of meat as long as he lived. He’d strung up tens of thousands of bewildered birds, their wings flapping in confusion amidst the chicken screech and the chicken stink, one after another heading down the line to have their heads removed and their innards ripped out. What did they ever do to us, he said, his face twisted with the memory of it, to deserve that?

She was still down on her knees, her eyes fixed on the swell of the tiger’s ribs as they rose and fell in the decelerating rhythm of sleep, thinking maybe she could give it eggs, a stainless steel pan with raw egg and then a line of individual eggs just tapped enough to show the yolk, when the back door of the neighbors’ house jerked open with a pneumatic wheeze and there was the Kaprielian woman, in her bathrobe and heels no less, letting the two yapping Pomeranians out into the yard. That was all it took to break the spell. The door wheezed shut, the dogs blew across the grass like down in a stiff wind, and the tiger was gone.

Later, after the dogs had got through sniffing and yapping and the neighborhood woke to the building clangor of a Saturday morning in March — doors slamming, voices rising and falling and engines of every conceivable bore and displacement screaming to life — she sat with Doug at the kitchen table and stared out into the gray vacancy of the backyard, where it had begun to rain. Doug was giving the paper his long squint. He’d lit a cigarette and he alternated puffs with delicate abbreviated sips of his second cup of overheated coffee. He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt stained with the redwood paint he’d used on the picnic table. At first he hadn’t believed her. “What,” he’d said, “it’s not April Fools’, not yet.” But then, there it was in the paper — a picture of a leathery white-haired man, a tracker, bent over a pugmark in the mud near a dude ranch in Simi Valley, and then they turned on the TV and the reporter was standing there in the backwash of the helicopter’s blades, warning people to stay inside and keep their pets with them because some sort of exotic cat had apparently got loose and could be a potential danger — and they’d both gone out back and studied the ground along the fence in silence.

There was nothing there, no sign, nothing. Just dirt. The first few spatters of rain feathered the brim of her hat, struck at her shoulders. For a moment she thought she could smell it, the odor released in a sprinkle of rain, the smell of litter, fur, the wild, but then she couldn’t be sure.

Doug was staring at her, his eyes pale and wondering. “You really saw it?” he said. “Really? You’re not shitting me, right?” In the next moment he went down on his heels and thrust his hand through the slats of the fence to pat the ground as if it were the striped hide of the animal itself.

She looked down at the top of his head, the hair matted and poorly cut, his bald spot spinning in a whorl of its own, galactic, a whole cosmos there. She didn’t bother to answer.

—

Todd barely fit the bed, which occupied its own snug little cubbyhole off the wall of the master bedroom, and twice, in his passion, he sat up abruptly and cracked his head on the low-slung ceiling, and she had to laugh, lying there naked beneath him, because he was so earnest, so eager in his application. But he was tender too, and patient with her — it had been a long time, too long, and she’d almost forgotten what a man could make her feel like, a man other than Robert, a stranger with a new body, new hands and tongue and groin. New rhythm. New smell. Robert had smelled of his mother, of the sad damp house he’d grown up in, carpet slippers and menthol, the old dog and the mold under the kitchen sink and the saccharine spice of the aftershave he tried to cover it all up with. Todd’s smell was different, fresher somehow, as if he’d just come back from a roll in the snow, but there was something else too, something darker and denser, and she held him a long while, her face pressed to the back of his head, before she understood what it was: the lingering scent of the fur hat that was lying now on the couch in the other room. She thought of that and then she was gone, deep in her coma, the whole world closing down on her cubbyhole in the wall.

He left her a note on the kitchen table. She saw it there when she got up for work, the windows dark and the heater ticking away like a Geiger counter. His hand was free-flowing, shapely, and that pleased her, the care that went into it, what it said about him as an individual. The words were pretty special too. He said that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met in his life and that he was going to take her out to breakfast in the morning, make it a date, if that was all right with her, and he signed his full name, Todd Jefferson Gray, and wrote out his address and phone number beneath it.

Next morning, when her shift was over, she walked across the snow-scabbed lot to her car, her spirits rising with every step. She never doubted he’d be there, not for a minute, but she couldn’t help craning her neck to sweep the lot, expecting him to emerge from one car or another, tall and quick-striding, his smile widening. As it was, she didn’t notice him until she was nearly on him — he wasn’t in a car; he didn’t have a car. He was standing just beyond the front bumper of her Saturn with a solemn look on his face, rooted to the ground like one of the trees that rose up behind him in a black tangle. When she was right there, right at the door of the car with the keys in her hand and he still hadn’t moved, she felt confused. “Todd?” she heard herself say. “Is everything all right?”