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

—

She lived in a cramped drafty ancient wreck of a nondescript house from the wood-burning era, about five blocks from campus. We ran all the way, of course — it was either that or freeze to the pavement — and the shared effort, the wheezing lungs and burning nostrils, got us over any awkwardness that might have ensued. We stood a minute in the superheated entryway that featured a row of tarnished brass coathooks, a dim hallway lined with doors coated in drab shiny paint and a smell of cat litter and old clothes. I followed her hair up a narrow stairway and into a one-room apartment not much bigger than a prison cell. It was dominated by a queen-size mattress laid out on the floor and a pair of speakers big enough to double as end tables, which they did. Bricks and boards for the bookcases that lined the walls and pinched them in like one of those shrinking rooms in a sci-fi flick, posters to cover up the faded nineteenth-century wallpaper, a greenish-looking aquarium with one pale bloated fish suspended like a mobile in the middle of it. The solitary window looked out on everything that was dead in the world. Bathroom down the hall.

And what did her room smell like? Like an animal’s den, like a burrow or a hive. And female. Intensely female. I glanced at the pile of brassieres, panties, body stockings and sweatsocks in the corner, and she lit a joss stick, pulled the curtains and put on a CD by a band I don’t want to name here, but which I like — there was no problem with her taste or anything like that. Or so I thought.

She straightened up from bending over the CD player and turned to me in the half-light of the curtained room and said, “You like this band?”

We were standing there like strangers amidst the intensely personal detritus of her room, awkward and insecure. I didn’t know her. I’d never been there before. And I must have seemed like some weird growth sprung up on the unsuspecting flank of her personal space. “Yeah,” I said, “they’re hot,” and I was going to expand on that with some technical praise, just to let her see how hip and knowing I was, when she threw out a sigh and let her arms fall to her sides.

“I don’t know,” she said, “what I really like is soul and gospel — especially gospel. I put this on for you.”

I felt deflated suddenly, unhip and uncool. There she was, joss stick sweetening the air, her hair a world of its own, my father’s fan — my absent famous self-absorbed son of a bitch of a father actually pimping for me — and I didn’t know what to say. After an awkward pause, the familiar band slamming down their chords and yowling out their shopworn angst, I said, “Let’s hear some of your stuff then.”

She looked pleased, her too-small mouth pushed up into something resembling a smile, and then she stepped forward and enveloped me in her hair. We kissed. She kissed me, actually, and I responded, and then she bounced the two steps to the CD player and put on Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters, a slow thump of tinny drums and an organ that sounded like something fresh out of the muffler shop, followed by a high-pitched blur of semihysterical voices. “Like it?” she said.

What could I say? “It’s different,” I said.

She assured me it would grow on me, like anything else, if I gave it half a chance, ran down the other band for their pedestrian posturing, and invited me to get into her bed. “But don’t take off your clothes,” she said, “not yet.”

I had a three o’clock class in psychology, the first meeting of the semester, and I suspected I was going to miss it. I was right. Victoria made a real ritual of the whole thing, clothes coming off with the masturbatory dalliance of a strip show, the covers rolling back periodically to show this patch of flesh or that, strategically revealed. I discovered her breasts one at a time, admired the tattoo on her ankle (a backward S that proved, according to her, that she was a reincarnated Norse skald), and saw that she really was a redhead in the conventional sense. Her lips were dry, her tongue was unstoppable, her hair a primal encounter. When we were done, she sat up and I saw that her breasts pointed in two different directions, and that was human in a way I can’t really express, a very personal thing, as if she was letting me in on a secret that was more intimate than the sex itself. I was touched. I admit it. I looked at those mismatched breasts and they meant more to me than her lips and her eyes and the deep thrumming instrument of her voice, if you know what I mean.

“So,” she said, sipping from a mug of water she produced from somewhere among a stack of books and papers scattered beside the mattress, “what do I call you? I mean, Achates — right? — that’s a real mouthful.”

“That’s my father,” I said. “One of his bullshit affectations — how could the great one have a kid called Joe or Evan or Jim-Bob or Dickie?” My head was on the pillow, my eyes were on the ceiling. “You know what my name means? It means ‘faithful companion,’ can you believe that?”

She was silent a moment, her gray eyes locked on me over the lip of the cup, her breasts dimpling with the cold. “Yeah,” she said, “I can see what you mean,” and she pulled the covers up to her throat. “But what do people call you?”

I stared bleakly across the room, fastening on nothing, and when I exhaled I could see my breath. Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters were still at it, punishing the rhythm section and charging after the vocals till you’d think somebody had set their dresses on fire. “My father calls me Ake,” I said finally, “or at least he used to when I used to know him. And in case you’re wondering how you spell that, that’s Ake with a k. ”

—

Victoria dropped out of the blond poet-novelist’s lit class, but I knew where she lived and you couldn’t miss her hair jogging across the tundra. I saw her maybe two or three times a week, especially on weekends. When things began to get to me — life, exams, too many shooters of Jack or tequila, my mother’s zombielike voice on the telephone — I sank into the den of Victoria’s room with its animal funk and shrinking walls as if I’d never climb back out, and it was nothing like the cold, dry burrow I thought of when I thought of my father. Just the opposite: Victoria’s room, with Victoria in it, was positively tropical, whether you could see your breath or not. I even began to develop a tolerance for the Angeline Sisters.

I avoided class the day we dissected the McNeil canon, but I was there for Delmore Schwartz and his amazing re-creation of his parents’ courtship unfolding on a movie screen in his head. In dreams begin responsibilities — yes, sure, but whose responsibility was I? And how long would I have to wait before we got to the sequel and my dreams? I’d looked through the photo albums, my mother an open-faced hippie in cutoffs and serape with her seamless blond hair and Slavic cheekbones and my father cocky and staring into the lens out of the shining halo of his hair, everything a performance, even a simple photograph, even then. The sperm and the egg, that was a biological concept, that was something I could envision up there on the big screen, the wriggling clot of life, the wet glowing ball of the egg, but picturing them coming together, his coldness, his arrogance, his total absorption in himself, that was beyond me. Chalk it up to reticence. To DNA. To the grandiosity of the patriarchal cock. But then he was me and I was him and how else could you account for it?

It was Victoria who called my attention to the poster. The posters, that is, about six million of them plastered all over every stationary object within a two-mile orbit of the campus as if he was a rock star or something, as if he really counted for anything, as if anybody could even read anymore let alone give half a shit about a balding, leather-jacketed, ex-hippie wordmeister who worried about his image first, his groin second, and nothing else after that. How did I miss it? A nearsighted dwarf couldn’t have missed it — in fact, all the nearsighted dwarves on campus had already seen it and were lining up with everybody even vaguely ambulatory for their $2.50 Student Activities Board — sponsored tickets: