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

The tequila burned in his stomach. There was no sound but for the hum of the refrigerator as it started up and clicked off again. Very gradually, the light began to swell round him as the sun searched through the haze to fill the kitchen and infuse the walls with color — a cheery daffodil yellow, the shade she’d picked out when they bought the condo two years ago on her twenty-ninth birthday. “This is the best birthday present I ever had,” she’d said, her voice soft and steady, and she’d leaned in to kiss him in the lifeless office where the escrow woman sat behind her block-like desk and took their signatures on one form after another as if she’d been made of steel and they’d run out of movable parts.

They’d celebrated that night with a bottle of champagne and dinner out and sex in their old apartment on their old bed that had come from Goodwill in a time when neither of them had a steady job. He looked round the room now — the most familiar room in the world, the place where they had breakfast together and dinner most nights, sharing the cooking and the TV news and a bottle of wine — and it seemed alien to him, as if he’d been snatched out of his life and set down here in this over-bright echoing space with its view of blacktop and wires and the inescapable palm with its ascending pineapple ridges and ragged wind-blown fronds.

The next thing he knew it was five o’clock and he heard her key turn in the lock and the faint sigh of the door as she pushed it shut behind her and then the drumbeat of her heels on the glazed Saltillo tile in the front hall. “Todd?” she called. “Todd, you home?” He felt his jaws clench. He didn’t answer. Her footsteps came down the hall, beating, beating. “Todd?”

He liked her in heels. Had liked her in heels, that is. She was a surgical nurse, working for a pair of plastic surgeons who’d partnered to open the San Roque Aesthetics Institute five years back, and she changed to flats while assisting at surgery but otherwise wore heels to show off her legs beneath the short skirts and calibrated tops she wore when consulting with prospective patients. “Advertising,” she called it. The breast implants — about which he’d been very vocal and very pleased — had come at a discount.

He was still at the table when she walked into the kitchen, the bottle on the counter, the shot glass beside him, the laptop just barely cracked. “What’s this?” she said, lifting the bottle from the counter and giving it a shake. “You’re drinking?” She came across the room to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and ran it up the back of his neck, then bent forward to lift the empty glass to her nose and take a theatrical sniff.

“Yeah,” he said, but he didn’t lift his eyes.

“That’s not like you. Tough day?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Well, if you’re partying”—and here her voice fluted above him, light and facetious, as if the world were still on its track and nothing had changed—“then I hope you won’t mind if I pour myself a glass of wine. Do we have any wine left?” Her hand dropped away and he felt a chill on the back of his neck where her palm had been. He heard her heels tapping like typewriter keys, then the wheeze of the vacuum seal on the refrigerator door, the cabinet working on its hinges, the sharp clink as the base of the wine glass came into contact with the granite counter, and finally the raucous celebratory splash of the wine. Still he didn’t look up. Her attitude — this sunniness, this self-possession, this blindness and blandness and business-as-usual crap — savaged him. Didn’t she know what was coming? Couldn’t she feel it the way animals do just before an earthquake strikes?

“That guy you used to date in college,” he said, his voice choked in his throat, “what was his name?”

He looked up now and she was poised there at the counter, leaning back into it, the glass of wine — sauvignon blanc, filled to the top — glowing with reflected light. She let out a little laugh. “What brought that up?”

“What color hair did he have? Was it short, long, what?”

“Jared,” she said, her eyes gone distant a moment. “Jared Reed. From New Joisey. ” She lifted the glass to her lips, took a sip, the gold chain she wore at her throat picking up the light now too. She was wearing a blue silk blouse open to the third button down. She put a hand there, to her collarbone. Sipped again. “I don’t know,” she said. “Brown. Black maybe? He wore it short, like Justin Timberlake. But why? Don’t tell me you’re jealous”—the facetious note again when all he could think of was leaping up from the table and slapping every shred of facetiousness out of her—“after all these years? Is that it? I mean, what do you care?”

“Rob sent me a video today.”

“Rob?”

“My brother. Remember my brother? Rob? ” His voice got away from him. He hadn’t meant to shout, hadn’t meant to be accusatory or confrontational — he just wanted answers, that was all.

She said nothing. Her face was cold, her eyes colder still.

“Maybe”—and here he flipped open the laptop—“maybe you ought to have a look at it and then you tell me what it is.” He was up out of the chair now, the tequila pitching him forward, and he didn’t care about the look on her face or the way she cradled the wine and held out her hands to him and he didn’t touch her — wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t touch her ever again. The kitchen door was a slab of nothing, but it slammed behind him and the whole house shook under the weight of it.

—

Later, as faces wheeled round him and the flat-screen TV behind the bar blinked and shifted over the game that was utterly meaningless to him now, he had the leisure to let his mind go free. School didn’t exist — lesson plans, papers to grade, none of it. Laurie didn’t exist either. And Jared Reed was just a ghost. And whether he had brown hair or black or muscles on top of muscles or a dick two feet long, it didn’t matter because he was just a ghost on a screen. Nothing. He was nothing. Less than nothing.

But here was the bartender (thirties, with a haircut like Rob’s and dressed in a cowboy shirt with embroidery round the pockets like icing on a cake) looming over him with the Jameson bottle held aloft. “Yeah,” he said, and he would have clarified by adding, Hit me again, but that would have been too much like being in a movie, a bad movie, bad and sad and pathetic. He wasn’t a drinker, not really, and he hadn’t wanted the tequila except that it was there because they didn’t keep anything in the house beyond that and a couple bottles of wine they got when it was on sale, but when they went out, he always ordered Jameson. Jameson was all he ever drank, aside from maybe a beer chaser, which he wasn’t having tonight, definitely wasn’t having. Rob drank it too. And their father, when he was alive. It was a family tradition, and how many times had they sat at dinner when they were kids and their father would say, Just wait till old man Jameson kicks off, then we’ll be rich, and they would chime, Who’s Jameson? and he’d say, Who’s Jameson? The Whiskey King, of course. And their mother: Don’t hold your breath.

And then the drink was there and he was sipping it, thinking of the last thing Rob had sent him as an attachment, and when was it? A week ago? Two? It was an article he’d downloaded from some obscure Web site and he’d forwarded it under the heading Look What Our Glorious Ancestor Was Up To. The ancestor in question — if he was an ancestor, of course, and there was the joke — was James Jameson, heir to the whiskey fortune. In 1888 Jameson was thirty-one years old, same age as Todd was now, and he was a wastrel and an adventurer, and because he was limp with boredom and had done all the damage he could in the clubs and parlors of Ireland, England and the Continent, he signed on for an African expedition under Henry Morton Stanley, of Livingston fame. They were in the Congo, in the heart of the heart of darkness, stuck on some river Todd had forgotten the name of though he’d read through the article over and over with a kind of sick fascination — stuck there and going nowhere. One morning when Stanley was away from camp, Jameson got the idea that he might like to visit one of the cannibal tribes to see how they went about their business and make a record of it in his sketchbook. From the beginning of the expedition, he’d made detailed drawings of tribesmen, game animals, the erratic vegetation and crude villages scattered along the banks of the rivers, and now he was going to draw cannibals. At work. For six handkerchiefs — not a dozen or two dozen, just six — he bought a ten-year-old slave girl and gave her as a gift to the cannibals, then sat there on a stump or maybe a camp chair, one leg crossed over the other, and focused his concentration. He drew the figure of the girl as she was stripped and bound to a tree, drew her as the knife went in under the breastbone and sliced downward. She never struggled or pleaded or cried out but just stood there bearing it all till her legs gave way and he drew that too, his hand flashing and the pencil growing duller while the mosquitoes hummed and the smoke of the cookfire rose greasily through the overhanging leaves.