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

“Whoa,” he said, “let’s just back up a minute — and don’t do anything, don’t unbutton your… because I have to ask Maggie into the room. For legal reasons.” He was at the door suddenly, the door swinging open, and he was calling down the hall for his secretary.

“I don’t want Maggie,” she said, and she had her brassiere off now and was working at the hook of her skirt. “I want to look real, not like some mannequin, not like her. Leave her out of this.”

She was looking over her shoulder at him as he stood at the door, the skirt easing down her thighs, and she hadn’t worn any stockings because they were just an encumbrance and she was here to be examined, to feel his hands on her, to set the conditions and know what it would take to improve. That was what this was all about, wasn’t it? Improvement?

(2005)

I’d used up all my sick days and the two personal days they allowed us, but when the alarm went off and the baby started squalling and my wife threw back the covers to totter off to the bathroom in a hobbled two-legged trot, I knew I wasn’t going in to work. It was as if a black shroud had been pulled over my face: my eyes were open but I couldn’t see. Or no, I could see — the pulsing LED display on the clock radio, the mounds of laundry and discarded clothes humped round the room like the tumuli of the dead, a hard-driving rain drooling down the dark vacancy of the window — but everything seemed to have a film over it, a world coated in Vaseline. The baby let out a series of scaled-back cries. The toilet flushed. The overhead light flicked on.

Clover was back in the room, the baby flung over one shoulder. She was wearing an old Cramps T-shirt she liked to sleep in and nothing else. I might have found this sexy to one degree or another but for the fact that I wasn’t at my best in the morning and I’d seen her naked save for one rock-and-roll memento T-shirt for something like a thousand consecutive mornings now. “It’s six-fifteen,” she said. I said nothing. My eyes eased shut. I heard her at the closet, and in the dream that crashed down on me in that instant she metamorphosed from a rippling human female with a baby slung over one shoulder to a great shining bird springing from the brink of a precipice and sailing on great shining wings into the void. I woke to the baby. On the bed. Beside me. “You change her,” my wife said. “You feed her. I’m late as it is.”

We’d had some people over the night before, friends from the pre-baby days, and we’d made margaritas in the blender, watched a movie and stayed up late talking about nothing and everything. Clover had shown off the baby — Xana, we’d named her Xana, after a character in one of the movies I’d edited, or actually, logged — and I’d felt a rush of pride. Here was this baby, perfect in every way, beautiful because her parents were beautiful, and that was all right. Tank — he’d been in my band, co-leader, co-founder, and we’d written songs together till that went sour — said she was fat enough to eat and I’d said, “Yeah, just let me fire up the barbie,” and Clover had given me her little drawn-down pout of disgust because I was being juvenile. We stayed up till the rain started. I poured one more round of margaritas and then Tank’s girlfriend opened her maw in a yawn that could have sucked in the whole condo and the street out front too and the party broke up. Now I was in bed and the baby was crawling up my right leg, giving off a powerful reek of shit.

The clock inched forward. Clover got dressed, put on her makeup and took her coffee mug out to the car and was gone. There was nothing heroic in what I did next, dealing with the baby and my own car and the stalled nose-to-tail traffic that made the three miles to the babysitter’s seem like a trek across the wastelands of the earth — it was just life, that was all. But as soon as I handed Xana over to Violeta at the door of her apartment that threw up a wall of cooking smells, tearful Telemundo dialogue and the diachronic yapping of her four Chihuahuas, I slammed myself into the car and called in sick. Or no: not sick. My sick days were gone, I reminded myself. And my personal days too. My boss picked up the phone. “Iron House Productions,” he said, his voice digging out from under the r ’s. He had trouble with r ’s. He had trouble with English, for that matter.

“Hello, Radko?”

“Yes, it is he — who is it now?”

“It’s me, Lonnie.”

“Let me guess — you are sick.”

Radko was one of that select group of hard chargers in the production business who kept morning hours, and that was good for me because with Clover working days and going to law school at night — and the baby, the baby, of course — my own availability was restricted to the daylight hours when Violeta’s own children were at school and her husband at work operating one of the cranes that lifted the beams to build the city out till there was nothing green left for fifty miles around. But Radko had promised me career advancement, moving up from logging footage to actual editing, and that hadn’t happened. On this particular morning, as on too many mornings in the past, I felt I just couldn’t face the editing bay, the computer screen, the eternal idiocy of the dialogue repeated over and over through take after take, frame after frame, “No, Jim, stop/No — Jim, stop!/No! Jim, Jim: stop!! ” I used to be in a band. I had a college degree. I was no drudge. Before I could think, it was out: “It’s the baby,” I said.

There was a silence I might have read too much into. Then Radko, dicing the interrogative, said, “What baby?”

“Mine. My baby. Remember the pictures Clover e-mailed everybody?” My brain was doing cartwheels. “Nine months ago? When she was born?”

Another long pause. Finally, he said, “Yes?”

“She’s sick. Very sick. With a fever and all that. We don’t know what’s wrong with her.” The wheel of internal calculus spun one more time and I made another leap, the one that would prove to be fatal: “I’m at the hospital now.”

—

As soon as I hung up I felt as if I’d been pumped full of helium, giddy with it, rising right out of my seat, but then the slow seepage of guilt, dread and fear started in, drip by drip, like bile drained out of a liver gone bad. A delivery truck pulled up next to me. Rain beat at the windshield. Two cholos rolled out of the apartment next to Violeta’s, the green block tattoos they wore like collars glistening in the light trapped beneath the clouds. I had the whole day in front of me. I could do anything. Go anywhere. An hour ago it was sleep I wanted. Now it was something else. A pulse of excitement, the promise of illicit thrills, started up in my stomach.

I drove down Ventura Boulevard in the opposite direction from the bulk of the commuters. They were stalled at the lights, a single driver in every car, the cars themselves like steel shells they’d extruded to contain their resentments. They were going to work. I wasn’t. After a mile or so I came to a diner where I sometimes took Clover for breakfast on Sundays, especially if we’d been out the night before, and on an impulse, I pulled into the lot. I bought a newspaper from the machine out front and then I took a copy of the free paper too and went on in and settled into a seat by the window. The smell of fresh coffee and home fries made me realize how hungry I was and I ordered the kind of breakfast I used to have in college after a night of excess — salt, sugar and grease, in quantity — just to open my pores. While I ate, I made my way through both newspapers, item by item, because this was luxurious, kingly, the tables clean, the place brightly lit and warm to the point of steaming with the bustle of the waitresses and the rain at the windows like a plague. Nobody said a word to me. Nobody even looked at me, but for my waitress. She was middle-aged, wedded to her uniform, her hair dyed shoe-polish black. “More coffee?” she asked for the third or fourth time, no hurry, no rush, just an invitation. I glanced at my watch and couldn’t believe it was only nine-thirty.