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

And what would Dr. Toni Brinsley-Schneider have thought of that? She’d probably applaud the Indians for eliminating the useless and weak, who would only have grown up crippled around their shattered limbs in any case. That was what Melanie was thinking as she closed the book and glanced up at the casual violence scrolling across the TV screen, but once she was on her feet she realized she was hungry and headed off in the direction of the kitchen, thinking tuna fish on rye with roasted sunflower seeds and red bell pepper. She supposed she’d be putting on weight now, eating for two, and wouldn’t that be the way to announce the baby to Sean six months down the road, like the prom mom who hid it till the last fatal minute: And you thought I was just going to fat, didn’t you, honey ?

Outside, beyond the windows, the sun washed over the flowers in the garden, all trace of the night’s mist burned off. There were juncos and finches at the feeder she shared with the upstairs neighbor, a dog asleep at the curb across the street, pure white fortresses of cloud building over the mountains. It was still, peaceful, an ordinary day, no Indians in sight, no bioethicists, no railroad killers hopping off freight trains and selecting victims at random, and she chopped onions and diced celery with a steady hand while something inexpressibly sad came over the radio, a cello playing in minor key, all alone, until it was joined by a single violin that sounded as if a dead man were playing it, playing his own dirge — and maybe he was dead, maybe the recording was fifty years old, she was thinking, and she had a sudden image of a man with a long nose and a Gypsy face, serenading the prisoners at Auschwitz.

Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. She should be filled with light, shouldn’t she? She should be knitting, baking, watching the children at the playground with the greedy intensity of a connoisseur.

The sunflower seeds were in the pan, the one with the loose handle and the black non-stick surface, heat turned up high, when the doorbell rang. The violin died at that moment — literally — and the unctuous, breathless voice of the announcer she hated (the one who always sounded as if he were straining over a bowel movement) filled the apartment as she crossed the front room and stepped into the hall. She was about to pull open the door — it would be the mailman at this hour, offering up a clutch of bills and junk mail and one of Sean’s articles on literary theory (or Theory, as he called it, “Just Theory, with a capital T, like Philosophy or Physics”), returned from an obscure journal with postage due — but something stopped her. “Who is it?” she called from behind the door, and she could smell the sunflower seeds roasting in the pan.

There was no answer, so she moved to the window beside the door and parted the curtains. A man stood on the concrete doorstep, staring at the flat plane of the door as if he could see through it. He was small and thin, no more than five-five or — six, tanned to the color of the copper teakettle on the stove and dressed in the oily jeans and all-purpose long-sleeved shirt of the bums who lined Cabrillo Boulevard with their Styrofoam cups and pint bottles — or should she call them panhandlers or the homeless or the apartmentally challenged? Sean called them bums, and she guessed she’d fallen into the habit herself. They said crude things to you when you walked down the street, gesturing with fingers that were as black as the stubs of cigars. They were bums, that was all, and who needed them?

But then the man turned to her, saw her there at the window and turned to her, and she had a shock: he was Hispanic, a Latino just like the man on TV, the killer, with the same dead cinders for eyes. He put three fingers together and pushed them at his open mouth, and she saw then that he had no mustache — no, no mustache, but what did that mean? Anybody could shave, even a bum. “What do you want?” she called, feeling trapped in her own apartment, caught behind the wall of glass like a fish in an aquarium.

He looked surprised by the question. What did he want? He wanted food, money, sex, booze, drugs, her car, her baby, her life, her apartment. “Hungry,” he said. And then, when she didn’t respond: “You got work?”

She just shook her head — No, she didn’t have any work — and all the time she had to give this man, this stranger, this bum, had already been used up, because there was smoke in the kitchen and the seeds were burning in the pan.

—

It was past eight when she drove home from work, feeling exhausted, as if she were in her eighth month instead of the second. The day was softening into night, birds dive-bombing the palms along the boulevard, joggers and in-line skaters reduced to shadows on the periphery of her vision. All through the afternoon the mist had been rolled up like a carpet on the horizon, but it was moving closer now and she could smell it on the air — it was going to be another dense, compacted night. She parked and came up the walk and saw that the upstairs neighbor — Jessica, Jessica-something, who’d been there only a month and was so pathologically shy she cupped both hands to her face when she talked to you as if a real live moving mouth were somehow offensive — had been doing something in the flower garden. The earth was raw in several spots, as if it had been turned over, and there was a spade leaning against the side of the house. Not that it mattered to Melanie — she’d never had a green thumb and plants were just plants to her. If Jessica wanted to plant flowers, that was fine; if she wanted to dig them up, that was fine too.

Sean was in the kitchen, banging things around and singing — bellowing — along with one of Wagner’s operas, the only music he ever listened to. And which one was it? — she’d heard them all a thousand times. There it was, yes, Siegfried going down for the count: Götterdämmerung. Sean was making his famous shrimp and avocado salad, and he was in the throes of something — Wagner, Theory, some sort of testosterone rush — and he barely glanced up at her as she trudged into the bedroom. Her mistake was in taking off her shoes, the flats she wore for the sake of her feet while propping up an automatic smile behind the reference desk, because once her shoes were off she felt out of balance and had to rest her head on the pillow, just for a minute.

The gods of Valhalla had been laid to rest and the house was silent when she awoke to the soft click of the bedroom door. Sean was standing there framed in the doorway, the tacky yellow globe of the hallway light hanging over his shoulder like a captive moon. It was dark beyond the windows. “What,” he said, “are you sick or something?”

Was she? Now was her chance, now was the time to tell him, to share the news, the joyous news, pop the cork on the bottle of champagne and let’s go out to a nice place, a really nice place, and save the famous shrimp and avocado salad for tomorrow. “No,” she said. “No. Just tired, that’s all.”

At dinner — Sean and Lacan and a scatter of papers, the shrimp salad, lemonade from the can and an incongruous side dish of Ranch Style barbecue beans, also from the can — she did tell him about the man at the door that morning. “He said he wanted work,” she said, waving a forkful of shrimp and beans in an attempt to delineate the scene for the third time, “and I told him I didn’t have any work for him. That was it. The whole thing.”

Sean had begun to develop a groove just over the bridge of his nose, a V-shaped gouge that might have been a scar or the mark of a hot branding iron. It vanished when he was asleep or sunk into the couch with a beer and the New York Times, but it was there now, deeper than ever. “You mean he was Mexican?”