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

There was a dim clutter of refuse in the hallway — broken music stands, half a smashed guitar, a big waist-high ashtray lifted from the Waldorf with the hotel’s name etched in the chrome and a thousand extinguished butts spilling over onto the floor — and a lingering smell of stopped-up toilets. She nearly tripped over something, she didn’t stop to see what, and then she was outside the restroom and a new smell came to her: he was smoking reefer in there, the moron. She’d dragged herself all the way out here in the cold to do a job, hoping for the best — hoping for a hit — and here he was, the great Johnny Bandon, the tea head, getting himself loaded in the can. Suddenly she was angry. Before she knew what she was doing she was pounding on the door like a whole van full of narcs. “Johnny!” she shouted. “Johnny, people are waiting.” She tried the doorknob. “Open up, will you?”

Nothing. But she knew that smell. There was the sound of water running, then the toilet flushed. “Shit,” she hissed. “Damn you, open up. I don’t know about you, but I need this, you hear me? Huh?” She felt something rise in her, exactly like that geyser she’d seen in Life magazine, red-hot, white-hot. She rattled the knob.

There was the metallic click of the bolt sliding back and then he pulled open the door and told her in an even voice to keep her shirt on, only he was smiling at her, giving her the reckless grin of abandon that ten years ago had charmed half the women in the country. She was conscious of the fact that in her heels they were the same height and the crazy idea that he’d be the perfect dance partner flitted through her head as he stood there at the door and the marijuana fumes boiled round him. What he said next totally disarmed her, his voice pitched to the familiar key of seduction: “What’s with the glasses? Somebody slug you, or what?”

The world leapt out at her when she slipped the sunglasses from her eyes, three shades brighter, though the hallway was still dim as a tomb. “It’s my eye,” she said, touching a finger to her cheekbone at the right orbit. “I woke up with it all bloodshot.”

From down the hall came the muted sound of the band working their way through the arrangement without them, a sweeping glide of strings, the corny cluck-cluck-knock of a glockenspiel and the tinkling of a triangle, and then the horns, bright and peppy, Christmas manufactured like a canned ham. “You’re nuts,” he said. “Your eye’s no more bloodshot than mine is—”

She couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, yeah? Have you looked in the mirror?”

They were both laughing suddenly, and then he took her by the arm and pulled her into the restroom with him. “You want some of this?” he said.

—

There was something about the moment — the complicit look she gave him, the way she showed her teeth when she laughed, the sense he had of getting away with something, as if they were two kids ducking out of school to have a smoke under the fire escape — that just lit him up, just like that, like a firecracker. Neff could wait. They could all wait. He passed her the reefer and watched her eyes go wide with greed as she inhaled and held it in, green eyes, glassy and green as the bottom of a Chianti bottle. After a moment the smoke began to escape her nostrils in a sporadic way, as if there was something burning inside of her, and he thought first of the incinerator in the basement of the tenement he’d grown up in, and the smell of it, of cardboard and wet newspaper and everything scraped off a plate, cat litter, dead pets, fingernail parings, and then, as if that sponge had wiped his brain clean, of church. Of votive candles. Of incense. Jesus, he was high as a kite.

“What?” she said, expelling the smoke through her mouth. “What’s that grin for?”

He let out a laugh — or no, a giggle. “I just had this image,” he said. “Very strange. Like you were on fire inside—”

Her eyes were on him, green and unblinking. She was smiling. “Me? Little old me? On fire?”

“Listen,” he said, serious suddenly, and he was so far out there he couldn’t follow his own chain of thought, “did you go to church when you were a kid? I want to know. You’re Catholic, right?”

Her eyes went away from him then, up to where one very stewed roach clung to the ceiling, and they came back again. “Yeah,” she said, ducking her head. “If you can believe it, I was in the choir.”

“You were? Wow. Me too. I mean, that was how I—”

She put a hand on his arm as if to emphasize the connection. “I know exactly what you mean — it’s probably how ninety percent of the singers out there got started. At least the ones I met anyway.”

“Church.”

“Church, yeah.” She was grinning at him, and when she grinned her dimples showed and her face opened up for him till he had to back up a step for fear of falling right into it.

He wanted to banter with her, say something clever, charming, keep it going, but instead he said, “You ever go anymore?”

She shook her head. “Not me. Uh-uh. It’s been years.” Her lips were pursed now, the dimples gone. “You?”

“Nah,” he said. “All that was a long time ago. When I was a kid, you know?”

An achingly slow moment revealed itself in silence. She passed him the reefer, he took a drag, passed it back. “I guess we’re both about halfway to hell by now,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, and everything seemed to let go of him to make way for that rush of exhilaration he’d been feeling ever since she’d stepped into the can with him, “I’d say it’s more like three quarters,” and they were laughing all over again, in two-part harmony.

—

It was Harvey himself who finally came to fetch them and when Johnny opened the door on him and the smoke flowed out into the hallway she felt shamed — this wasn’t what she’d come for, this wasn’t professional or even sensible. Of course, Harvey had seen it all in his day, but still he gave her a sour look and it made her feel like some runaway or delinquent caught in the act. For a moment she flashed on the one time she’d been arrested — in a hotel room in Kansas City, after a night when she’d felt the music right down in her cells, when she’d felt unbeatable — but she stopped right there amidst the clutter and shook out her hair to compose herself. Harvey was white-faced. He was furious and why wouldn’t he be? But Johnny chose to ignore it, still riding the exhilaration they’d felt in the bathroom — and it wasn’t the reefer, that wasn’t it at all, or not all of it — and he said, “Hey, Harvey, come on, man, don’t sweat it. We’re ready to slay ’em, aren’t we, babe?”

“Sure,” she said, “sure,” and then they were back in the studio, dirty looks all around, Harvey settling into the control booth with Fred Silver, and the opening strains of “Little Suzy Snowflake,” replete with glockenspiel and tinkling triangle, enveloping the room.

—

“No, no, no, no,” Johnny shouted, waving his arms through the intro, “cut, cut, cut!”

Neff’s face hung suspended behind the window of the control booth. “What’s the matter now?” his voice boomed, gigantic, disproportionate, sliced three ways with exasperation.

Johnny was conscious of his body, of his shoulders slipping against the pads of his jacket and the slick material of his pants grabbing at his crotch as he turned and gestured to the booth with both palms held out in offering. “It’s just that Darlene and me were working something out back there — warming up, you know? I just think we need to cut the B-side first. What do you think?”

Nobody said a word. He looked at Darlene. Her eyes were blank.

There was a rumble from the control booth, Harvey with his hand over the mike conferring with Fred Silver, the session men studying the cuffs of their trousers, something, somewhere, making a dull slippery hissing sound — they were running tape, and the apprehension of it brought him back to himself.