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

By lunch he’d forgotten all about it, but when he checked his phone messages there was a text from Rob, which read only: ?????? Sandwich in hand, the noontime buzz of the lounge reverberating round him — food, caffeine, two periods to go — he called Rob’s number, but there was no answer and the message box was full. Of course. He summoned his brother’s face, the hipster haircut, the goofball grin, eyes surfing the crest of some private joke — when was he going to grow up? — then dialed Laurie at work because it came to him suddenly that they were supposed to go out to dinner tonight with one of her co-workers and her husband, whom he’d never met, and he was wondering how that might or might not interfere with the football game on TV, but she didn’t answer either.

Then the day was over and he was in his car, heading to the dentist’s. The drizzle had given way to a drifting haze that admitted the odd column of sunlight so that the last he saw of the school, for today at least, was a brightly lit shot of glowing white stucco and orange-tile roof rapidly dwindling in the rearview mirror. Traffic was light and he was fifteen minutes early for the dentist, whose office was on the second floor of a vaguely Tudorish building that anchored an open-air mall — bank below, Italian restaurant with outdoor seating bottom floor left, then a realtor and a sandwich shop and on and on all the way round the U-shaped perimeter. A patch of lawn divided the parking lot. There were the usual shrubs and a pair of long-necked palms rising out of the grass to let you know you weren’t in Kansas, appearances to the contrary.

He debated whether to drift over to the sandwich shop for a bite of something, but thought better of it, remembering the time the dentist had chastised him in a high singsong voice because he hadn’t brushed after lunch, the point of which had escaped him, since he’d been coming in to get his teeth cleaned in any case. The thought made him shift the rearview and pull back his lips in a grimace to study his gums and then work a fingernail between his front teeth, after which he took a swig of bottled water and swished it around in his mouth before rolling down the window and spitting it out. That was just the way he was, he supposed — the kind of person who did what was expected of him, who wanted to smooth things out and take the path of least resistance. Unlike Rob.

It was then that he thought of the video. He looked round him, his blood quickening, but no one was paying any attention to him. The cars on either side were empty and the only movement was at the door of the bank, where every few minutes someone would come in or out and the guard stationed there (slab-faced, heavy in the haunches, older — forty, forty-five, it was hard to say) would casually nod his head in recognition. Shielding the laptop with the back of the seat and the baffle of his own torso, he brought up the video — porn, he was watching porn right there in the dentist’s parking lot where anybody could see, and he wasn’t thinking about students or students’ parents or the rent-a-cop at the bank or the real thing either, because all at once the world had been reduced to the dimensions of the screen on the seat beside him.

He saw an anonymous room, a bed, the incandescence of too-white flesh and the sudden thrust of bodies cohering as the scene came into focus. In the center of the bed was the woman, on all fours, the man standing behind her and working at her, his eyes closed and his face drawn tight with concentration. The woman had her head down so that her own face was hidden by the spill of her hair, red-gold hair parted in the middle and swaying rhythmically as she rocked back into him. He saw her shoulders flex and release, her fingers spread and wrists stiffen against the white field of the sheets, and then she lifted her head and he saw her face and the shock of it made something surge up and beat inside of him with a fierce sudden clangor that was like the pounding of a mallet on a steel rail. He watched as she stared into the camera, her eyes receding beneath the weight of the moment — Laurie’s eyes, his wife’s — and then he slapped the screen shut. I Thought You’d Want To Know.

For a long moment he sat there frozen, unable to move, unable to think, the laptop like a defused bomb on the seat beside him. He wanted to look again, wanted to be sure, wanted to feel the surge of shock and fear and hate pulse through him all over again, but not now, not here. He had to get home, that was all he could think. But what of the dentist? Here he was in the parking lot, staring up at the bank of windows where Dr. Sedgwick would be bent over his current patient, finishing up with the pads and the amalgam and all the rest in anticipation of his three-thirty appointment. But he couldn’t face the dentist now, couldn’t face anybody. He was punching in the dentist’s number, the excuse already forming on his lips (food poisoning, he was right out there in the lot, but he was so sick all of a sudden he didn’t think he could, or should… and maybe he’d better make another appointment?), when he became aware that there was someone standing there beside the car window. A girl. In her twenties. All made up and in a pair of tight blue pants of some shiny material that caught the light and held it as she bent to the door of the car next to his while another girl clicked the remote on the far side and the locks chirped in response. She didn’t look at him, not even a glance, but she was bending over to slip something off the seat, on full display, every swell and cleft and crease — inches from him, right in his face — and all at once he was so infuriated that when the dentist’s secretary answered in her bland professional tone he all but shouted into the phone, “I can’t make it. I’m sick.”

There was a pause. Then the secretary: “Who is this? Who’s speaking, please?”

He pictured her, a squat woman with enormous breasts who doubled as hygienist and sometimes took over the simpler procedures when Dr. Sedgwick was busy with an emergency. “Todd,” he said. “Todd Jameson?”

Another pause. “But you’re the three-thirty—”

“Yeah, I know, but something’s come up. I’m sick. All of a sudden, and I—” The car beside him started up, the long gleaming tube of the chassis sliding back and away from him, and there was the lawn, there were the palm trees, but all he could see was Laurie, the way her fingers stiffened on the sheets and her eyes went on gazing into the camera but didn’t register a thing.

“Our policy is for a twenty-four hour cancellation or else we have no choice but to charge you.”

“I’m sick. I told you.”

“I’m sorry.”

The moment burst on him like one of those rogue waves at the beach and he came within a hair of shouting an obscenity into the receiver but he caught himself. “I’m sorry too,” he said.

At home, he found he was shaking so hard he could barely get the key in the door, and though he didn’t want to, though it wasn’t even four yet, he went straight to the kitchen and poured himself a shot of the tequila they kept on hand for margaritas when people came over. He didn’t bother with salt or lime but just threw it back neat and if this was the cliché—your wife has sex with another man and you go straight for the sauce — then so be it. The tequila tasted like soap. No matter. He poured another, downed it, and still he was trembling. Then he sat down at the kitchen table, opened the laptop, clicked on Rob’s e-mail and watched the video all the way through.

This time the blow was even harsher, a quick hot jolt that seared his eyes and shot through him from his fingertips to his groin. The whole thing lasted less than sixty seconds, in medias res, and what had preceded it — disrobing, a kiss, foreplay — remained hidden. The act itself was straightforward as far as it went, no acrobatics, no oral sex, just him behind her and the rhythmic swaying that was as earnest and inevitable as when any two mammals went at it. Dogs. Apes. Husbands and wives. At the moment of release, she looked back at the guy doing it to her and as if at a signal rolled over and here were his knees in the frame now and his torso looming as he covered her with his own body and they kissed, their two heads bobbing briefly in the foreground before the screen went dark. The second time through, details began to emerge. The setting, for one thing. Clearly, it was a dorm room — there was the generic desk to the left of the bed, a stack of books, the swivel chair with the ghosts of their uninhabited clothes thrown over it, Levi’s, a belt buckle, the silken sheen of her panties. And Laurie. This was Laurie before she’d cut her hair, before her implants, before he’d even met her. Laurie in college. Fucking.