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

“You think I ought to speak with him?” I said. “Gerard, I mean?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” my wife said. And then, the corners of her mouth sinking toward her chin, she added, “The poor man.”

I went to visit him the next day — a Saturday, as it happened. The dogs needed walking, so I took them both with me, by way of example, I suppose, and because when I’m home — and not away on the business that takes me all over the world, sometimes for weeks or even months at a time — I like to give them as much attention as I can. Gerard’s cottage was half a mile or so from our house, and I enjoyed the briskness of the season — it was early December, the holidays coming on, a fresh breeze spanking my cheeks. I let the dogs run free ahead of me and admired the way the pine forest B.P. Newhouse had planted all those years ago framed and sculpted the sky. The first thing I noticed on coming up the walk was that Gerard hadn’t bothered to rake the leaves from his lawn or cover any of his shrubs against the frost. There were other signs of neglect: the storm windows weren’t up yet, garbage overspilled the two cans in the driveway, and a pine bough, casualty of the last storm, lay across the roof of the house like the severed hand of a giant. I rang the bell.

Gerard was a long time answering. When finally he did come to the door, he held it open just a crack and gazed out at me as if I were a stranger. (And I was nothing of the sort — our parents had known each other, we’d played couples bridge for years and had once taken a road trip to Hyannis Port together, not to mention the fact that we saw each other at the lake nearly every day in the summer, shared cocktails at the clubhouse and basked in an air of mutual congratulation over our separate decisions not to complicate our lives with the burden of children.) “Gerard,” I said. “Hello. How are you feeling?”

He said nothing. He looked thinner than usual, haggard. I wondered if the rumors were true — that he wasn’t eating, wasn’t taking care of himself, that he’d given way to despair.

“I was just passing by and thought I’d stop in,” I said, working up a grin though I didn’t feel much in the mood for levity and had begun to wish I’d stayed home and let my neighbor suffer in peace. “And look,” I said, “I’ve brought Tim and Tim II with me.” The dogs, hearing their names, drew themselves up out of the frost-blighted bushes and pranced across the doormat, inserting the long damp tubes of their snouts in the crack of the door.

Gerard’s voice was hoarse. “I’m allergic to dogs,” he said.

Ten minutes later, after we’d gone through the preliminaries and I was seated on the cluttered couch in front of the dead fireplace while Tim and Tim II whined from the front porch, I said, “Well, what about a cat?” And then, because I was mortified at the state to which he’d sunk — his clothes were grubby, he smelled, the house was like the lounge in a transient hotel — I found myself quoting my wife’s statistic about smiling pet owners.

“I’m allergic to cats too,” he said. He was perched uncomfortably on the canted edge of a rocker and his eyes couldn’t seem to find my face. “But I understand your concern, and I appreciate it. And you’re not the first — half a dozen people have been by, pushing one thing or another on me: pasta salad, a baked ham, profiteroles, and pets too. Siamese fighting fish, hamsters, kittens. Mary Martinson caught me at the post office the other day, took hold of my arm and lectured me for fifteen minutes on the virtues of emus. Can you believe it?”

“I feel foolish,” I said.

“No, don’t. You’re right, all of you — I need to snap out of it. And you’re right about a pet too.” He rose from the chair, which rocked crazily behind him. He was wearing a stained pair of white corduroy shorts and a sweatshirt that made him look as gaunt as the Masai my wife and I had photographed on our safari to Kenya the previous spring. “Let me show you,” he said, and he wound his way through the tumbling stacks of magazines and newspapers scattered round the room and disappeared into the back hall. I sat there, feeling awkward — was this what it would be like if my wife should die before me? — but curious too. And, in a strange way, validated. Gerard Loomis had a pet to keep him company: mission accomplished.

When he came back into the room, I thought at first he’d slipped into some sort of garish jacket or cardigan, but then I saw, with a little jolt of surprise, that he was wearing a snake. Or, that is, a snake was draped over his shoulders, its extremities dangling beyond the length of his arms. “It’s a python,” he said. “Burmese. They get to be twenty-five feet long, though this one’s just a baby.”

I must have said something, but I can’t really recall now what it was. I wasn’t a herpetophobe or anything like that. It was just that a snake wasn’t what we’d had in mind. Snakes didn’t fetch, didn’t bound into the car panting their joy, didn’t speak when you held a rawhide bone just above shoulder level and twitched it invitingly. As far as I knew, they didn’t do much of anything except exist. And bite.

“So what do you think?” he said. His voice lacked enthusiasm, as if he were trying to convince himself.

“Nice,” I said.

—

I don’t know why I’m telling this story — perhaps because what happened to Gerard could happen to any of us, I suppose, especially as we age and our spouses age and we’re increasingly set adrift. But the thing is, the next part of what I’m going to relate here is a kind of fiction, really, or a fictive reconstruction of actual events, because two days after I was introduced to Gerard’s python — he was thinking then of naming it either Robbie or Siddhartha — my wife and I went off to Switzerland for an account I was overseeing there and didn’t return for four months. In the interval, here’s what happened.

There was a heavy snowfall the week before Christmas that year and for the space of nearly two days the power lines were down. Gerard woke the first morning to a preternaturally cold house and his first thought was for the snake. The man in the pet shop at the mall had given him a long lecture before he bought the animal. “They make great pets,” he’d said. “You can let them roam the house if you want and they’ll find the places where they’re comfortable. And the nice thing is they’ll come to you and curl up on the couch or wherever, because of your body heat, you understand.” The man — he wore a nametag that read Bozeman and he looked to be in his forties, with a gray-flecked goatee and his hair drawn back in a patchily dyed ponytail — clearly enjoyed dispensing advice. As well he should, seeing that he was charging some four hundred dollars for a single reptile that must have been as common as a garden worm in its own country. “But most of all, though, especially in this weather, you’ve got to keep him warm. This is a tropical animal we’re talking about here, you understand? Never — and I mean never — let the temperature fall below eighty.”

Gerard tried the light on the nightstand, but it was out. Ditto the light in the hall. Outside, the snow fell in clumps, as if it had been preformed into snowballs somewhere high in the troposphere. In the living room, the thermostat read sixty-three degrees, and when he tried to click the heat on, nothing happened. The next thing he knew he was crumpling newspaper and stacking kindling in the fireplace, and where were the matches? A quick search round the house, everything a mess (and here the absence of Marietta bit into him, down deep, like a parasitical set of teeth), the drawers stuffed with refuse, dishes piled high, nothing where it was supposed to be. Finally he retrieved an old lighter from a pair of paint-stained jeans on the floor in the back of the closet and he had the fire going. Then he went looking for Siddhartha. He found the snake curled up under the kitchen sink where the hot water pipe fed into the faucet and dishwasher, but it was all but inanimate, as cold and slick as a garden hose left out in the frost.