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

What can I say? I felt bad about the whole business, felt low and despicable, but I cracked the plastic lid and sipped the chai, and as if I weren’t even conscious of what my fingers were doing, I started in on the cannoli, one by one, till the platter was bare. I was just sucking the last of the sugar from my fingertips when Steve Bartholomew, a guy of thirty or so who worked in special effects, a guy I barely knew, came up to me and without a word pressed a tin of butter cookies into my hand. “Hey,” I said, addressing his retreating shoulders, “thanks, man, thanks. It means a lot.” By noon my desk was piled high with foodstuffs — sandwiches, sweets, a dry salami as long as my forearm — and at least a dozen gray-jacketed sympathy cards inscribed by one co-worker or another. I wanted to hide. Wanted to quit. Wanted to go home, tear the phone out of the wall, get into bed and never leave. But I didn’t. I just sat there, trying to work, giving one person after another a zombie smile and my best impression of the thousand-yard stare.

Just before quitting time, Radko appeared, his face like an old paper bag left out in the rain. He was flanked by Joel Chinowski. I glanced up at them out of wary eyes and in a flash of intuition I realized how much I hated them both, how much I wanted only to jump to my feet like a cornered animal and punch them out, both of them. Radko said nothing. He just stood there gazing down at me and then, after a moment, he pressed one hand to my shoulder in Slavic commiseration, turned and walked away. “Listen, man,” Joel said, shifting his eyes away from mine, “we all wanted to… Well, we got together, me and some of the others, and I know it isn’t much, but—”

I saw now that he was holding a plastic grocery sack in one hand. I knew what was in the sack. I tried to wave it away, but he thrust it at me and I had no choice but to take it. Later, when I got home and the baby was in her high chair smearing her face with Cream of Wheat and I’d slipped the microwave pizza out of its box, I sat down and emptied the contents of the bag on the kitchen table. It was mainly cash, but there were maybe half a dozen checks too. I saw one for twenty-five dollars, another for fifty. The baby made one of those expressions of baby joy, sharp and sudden, as if the impulse had seized her before she could process it. It was five-thirty and the sinking sun was pasted over the windows. I sifted the bills through my hands, tens and twenties, fives — a lot of fives — and surprisingly few singles, thinking how generous my co-workers were, how good and real and giving, but I was grieving all the same, grieving beyond any measure I could ever have imagined or contained. I was in the process of counting the money, thinking I’d give it back — or donate it to some charity — when I heard Clover’s key in the lock and I swept it all back into the bag and tucked that bag in the deep recess under the sink where the water persistently dripped from the crusted-over pipe and the old sponge there smelled of mold.

—

The minute my wife left the next morning I called Radko and told him I wasn’t coming in. He didn’t ask for an excuse, but I gave him one anyway. “The funeral,” I said. “It’s at eleven a.m., just family, very private. My wife’s taking it hard.” He made some sort of noise on the other end of the line — a sigh, a belch, the faintest cracking of his knuckles. “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be in tomorrow without fail.”

And then the day began, but it wasn’t like that first day, not at all. I didn’t feel giddy, didn’t feel liberated or even relieved — all I felt was regret and the cold drop of doom. I deposited the baby at Violeta’s and went straight home to bed, wanting only to clear some space for myself and think things out. There was no way I could return the money — I wasn’t that good an actor — and I couldn’t spend it either, even to make up for the loss of pay. That would have been low, lower than anything I’d ever done in my life. I thought of Clover then, how furious she’d be when she found out my pay had been docked. If it had been docked. There was still a chance Radko would let it slide, given the magnitude of my tragedy, a chance that he was human after all. A good chance.

No, the only thing to do was bury the money someplace. I’d burn the checks first — I couldn’t run the risk of anybody uncovering them; that would really be a disaster, magnitude 10. Nobody could explain that, though various scenarios were already suggesting themselves — a thief had stolen the bag from the glove box of my car; it had blown out the window on the freeway while I was on my way to the mortuary; the neighbor’s pet macaque had come in through the open bathroom window and made off with it, wadding the checks and chewing up the money till it was just monkey feces now. Monkey feces. I found myself repeating the phrase, over and over, as if it were a prayer. It was a little past nine when I had my first beer. And for the rest of the day, till I had to pick up the baby, I never moved from the couch.

I tried to gauge Clover’s mood when she came in the door, dressed like a lawyer in her gray herringbone jacket and matching skirt, her hair pinned up and her eyes in traffic mode. The place was a mess. I hadn’t picked up. Hadn’t put on anything for dinner. The baby, asleep in her molded plastic carrier, gave off a stink you could smell all the way across the room. I looked up from my beer. “I thought we’d go out tonight,” I told her. “My treat.” And then, because I couldn’t help myself, I added: “I’m just trashed from work.”

She wasn’t happy about it, I could see that, lawyerly calculations transfiguring her face as she weighed the hassle of running up the boulevard with her husband and baby in tow before leaving for her eight o’clock class. I watched her reach back to remove the clip from her hair and shake it loose. “I guess,” she said. “But no Italian.” She’d set down her briefcase in the entry hall, where the phone was, and she put a thumb in her mouth a moment — a habit of hers; she was a fingernail chewer — before she said, “What about Chinese?” She shrugged before I could. “As long as it’s quick, I don’t really care.”

I was about to agree with her, about to rise up out of the grip of the couch and do my best to minister to the baby and get us out the door, en famille, when the phone rang. Clover answered. “Hello? Uh-huh, this is she.”

My right knee cracked as I stood, a reminder of the torn ACL I’d suffered in high school when I’d made the slightest miscalculation regarding the drop off the backside of a boulder while snowboarding at Mammoth.

“Jeannie?” my wife said, her eyebrows lifting in two perfect arches. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, Jeannie —how are you?”

There was a long pause as Jeannie said what she was going to say and then my wife said, “Oh, no, there must be some mistake. The baby’s fine. She’s right here in her carrier, fast asleep.” And her voice grew heartier, surprise and confusion riding the cusp of the joke, “She could use a fresh diaper, judging from the smell of her, but that’s her daddy’s job, or it’s going to be if we ever expect to—”

And then there was another pause, longer this time, and I watched my wife’s gaze shift from the form of the sleeping baby in her terry-cloth jumpsuit to where I was standing beside the couch. Her eyes, in soft focus for the baby, hardened as they climbed from my shoetops to my face, where they rested like two balls of granite.

—

Anybody would have melted under that kind of scrutiny. My wife, the lawyer. It would be a long night, I could see that. There would be no Chinese, no food of any kind. I found myself denying everything, telling her how scattered Jeannie was and how she must have mixed us up with the Lovetts — she remembered Tony Lovett, worked in sfx? Yeah, they’d just lost their baby, a little girl, yeah. No, it was awful. I told her we’d all chipped in—“Me too, I put in a fifty, and that was excessive, I know it, but I felt I had to, you know? Because of the baby. Because what if it happened to us?” I went on in that vein till I ran out of breath and when I tried to be nonchalant about it and go to the refrigerator for another beer, she blocked my way. “Where’s the money?” she said.