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

TIM McNEIL

READING FROM ELECTRONIC

ORPHANS & BLOOD TIES

FEB. 28, 8:00 P.M.

DUBOFSKY HALL

Victoria was right there with me, out front of the Student Union, the poster with his mugshot of a photo staring out at me from behind the double-insulated glass panel that reflected the whole dead Arctic world and me in the middle of it, and we had to dance on our toes and do aerobics for a full two minutes there to stave off hypothermia while I let the full meaning of it sink in. My first response was outrage, and so was my second. I bundled Victoria through the door and out of the blast of the cold, intimately involved in the revolution of her hair, the smell of her gray bristling fake fur coat that looked like half a dozen opossums dropped on her from high, even the feel of her breasts beneath all that wintry armament, and I howled in protest.

“How in Christ’s name could he do this to me?” I shouted across the echoing entranceway, pink-nosed idiots in their hooded parkas coming and going, giving me their eat-shit-and-die looks. I was furious, out of control. Victoria snatched at my arm to calm me, but I tore away from her.

“He planned this, you know. He had to. He couldn’t leave well enough alone, couldn’t let me get away from him and be just plain nobody up here among the cowflops in this podunk excuse for a university — no, it’s not Harvard, it’s not Stanford, but at least I didn’t take a nickel of his money for it. You think he’d ever even consider reading here even if the Board of Regents got down and licked his armpits and bought him a new Porsche and promised him all the coeds in Burge to fuck one by one till they dropped dead from the sheer joy of it?”

Victoria just stood there looking at me out of her flat gray eyes, rocking back and forth on the heels of her red leather boots with the cowgirl filigree. We were blocking the doors and people were tramping in and out, passing between us, a trail of yellow slush dribbling behind them in either direction. “I don’t know,” Victoria said over the heads of two Asian girls wrapped up like corpses, “I think it’s kind of cool.”

A day later, the letter came. Personalized stationery, California address. I tore it open in the hallway outside the door of my overheated, overlit, third-floor room in the sad-smelling old dorm:

Querido Ake:

I know it’s been a while but my crazy life just gets crazier what with the European tour for Orphans and Judy and Josh, but I want to make it up to you however I can. I asked Jules to get me the gig at Acadia purposely to give me an excuse to see how you’re getting along. Let’s do dinner or something afterward — bring one of your girlfriends along. We’ll do it up. We will.

Mucho,

Dad

This hit me like a body blow in the late rounds of a prizefight. I was already staggering, bloodied from a hundred hooks and jabs, ten to one against making it to the bell, and now this. Boom. I sat down on my institutional bed and read the thing over twice. Judy was his new wife, and Josh, six months old and still shitting in his pants, was my new brother. Half brother. DNA rules. Shit, it would have been funny if he was dead and I was dead and the whole world a burned-out cinder floating in the dead-black hole of the universe. But I wasn’t dead, and didn’t want to be, not yet at least. The next best thing was being drunk, and that was easy to accomplish. Three Happy Hours and a good lip-splitting, sideburn-thumping altercation with some mountainous asshole in a pair of Revo shades later, and I was ready for him.

—

You probably expect me to report that my father, the genius, blew into town and fucked my lit professor, Victoria, the cafeteria ladies and two or three dogs he stumbled across on the way to the reading, but that’s not the way it fell out. Not at all. In fact, he was kind of sorry and subdued and old-looking. Real old-looking, though by my count he must have been fifty-three or maybe fifty-four. It was as if his whole head had collapsed like a rotten jack-o’-lantern, his eyes sucked down these volcanoes of wrinkles, his hair standing straight up on his head like a used toilet brush. But I’m getting ahead of myself. According to my roommate, Jeff Heymann, he’d called about a hundred times and finally left a message saying he was coming in early and wanted to have lunch too, if that was okay with me. It wasn’t okay. I stayed away from the telephone, and I stayed away from my room. In fact, I didn’t even go near the campus for fear of running into him as he long-legged his way across the quad, entourage in tow. I blew off my classes and sank into Victoria’s nest as if it was an opium den, sleep and forgetfulness, Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters keeping me company, along with a bottle of Don Q Victoria’s dad had brought back from Puerto Rico for her. What was my plan? To crash and burn. To get so fucked up I’d be in a demi-coma till the lunch was eaten, the reading read and dinner forgotten. I mean, fuck him. Really.

The fatal flaw in my plan was Victoria.

She didn’t stay there to comfort me with her hair, her neat little zipper of a mouth and her mismatched breasts. No, she went to class, very big day, exams and papers and quizzes. So she said. But do I have to tell you where she really was? Can’t you picture it? The fan, the diehard, somebody who supposedly cared about me, and there she was, camped outside his hotel in the Arctic wind with the snot crusted round her nose ring. They wouldn’t tell her what room he was in, and when she took exception to the attitude of the girl behind the desk, they told her she’d have to wait outside — on the public sidewalk. While she was waiting and freezing and I was attempting to drink myself comatose, he was making phone calls. Another hundred to my room and then to the registrar and the dean and anybody else who might have had a glimmer of my whereabouts, and of course they all fell over dead and contacted my professors, the local police — Christ, probably even the FBI, the CIA and TRW.

And then it was lunchtime and all the cheeses and honchos from the English Department wanted to break bread with him, so out the door he went, not with Judy on his arm or some more casual acquaintance who might have been last night’s groin massager or the flight attendant who’d served him his breakfast, but his biographer. His biographer. Arm in arm with this bald guy half his height and a face depleted by a pair of glasses the size of the ones Elton John used to wear onstage, trailing dignitaries and toadies, and who does he run into?

Ten minutes later he’s coming up the stairs at Victoria’s place, and beneath the wailing of the Sisters and the thump of the organ I can hear his footsteps, his and nobody else’s, and I know this: after all these years my father has come for me.

—

Lunch was at the Bistro, one of the few places in town that aspired to anything more than pizza, burgers and burritos. My father sat at the head of the table, of course, and I, three-quarters drunk on white rum, sat at his right hand. Victoria was next to me, her expression rapt, her hair snaking out behind me in the direction of the great man like the tendrils of some unkillable plant, and the biographer, sunk behind his glasses, hunched beside her with a little black notepad. The rest of the table, from my father’s side down, was occupied by various members of the English Department I vaguely recognized and older lawyer types who must have been deans or whatever. There was an awkward moment when Dr. Delpino, my American Lit professor, came in, but her eyes, after registering the initial surprise and recalculating our entire relationship from the first day’s roll call on, showed nothing but a sort of fawning, shimmering awe. And how did I feel about that? Sick. Just plain sick.