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

I drank desperate cups of black coffee and tried to detoxify myself with something called Coquilles Saint Jacques, which amounted to an indefinable rubbery substance sealed in an impenetrable layer of baked cheese. My father held forth, witty, charming, as pleased with himself as anybody alive. He said things like “I’m glad you’re asking me to speak on the only subject I’m an authority on — me,” and with every other breath he dropped the names of the big impressive actors who’d starred in the big impressive movie version of his last book. “Well,” he’d say, “as far as that goes, Meryl once told me…,” or, “When we were on location in Barbados, Brad and Geena and I used to go snorkeling practically every afternoon, and then it was conch ceviche and this rum drink they call Mata-Mata, after the turtle, and believe me, kill you it does….”

Add to this the fact that he kept throwing his arm round the back of my chair (and so, my shoulders) as if I’d been there with him through every scintillating tête-à-tête and sexual and literary score, and you might begin to appreciate how I felt. But what could I do? He was playing a role that would have put to shame any of the big-gun actors he named, and I was playing my role too, and though I was seething inside, though I felt betrayed by Victoria and him and all the stupid noshing doglike faces fawning round the table, I played the dutiful and proud son to Academy Award proportions. Or maybe I wasn’t so great. At least I didn’t jump up and flip the table over and call him a fraud, a cheat and a philanderer who had no right to call anybody his son, let alone me. But oh, how those deans and professors sidled up to me afterward to thoroughly kiss my ass while Dr. Delpino glowed over our little secret and tried to shoulder Victoria out of the way. And Victoria. That was another thing. Victoria didn’t seem to recall that I was still alive, so enthralled was she by the overblown spectacle of my father the genius.

He took me aside just before we stepped back out into the blast of the wind, confidential and fatherly, the others peeling back momentarily in deference to the ties of the blood, and asked me if I was all right. “Are you all right?” he said.

Everything was in a stir, crescendoing voices, the merry ritual of the zippers, the gloves, the scarves and parkas, a string quartet keening through the speakers in some weird key that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. “What do you mean?” I said.

I looked into his face then, and the oldness dropped away from him: he was my pal, my dad, the quick-blooded figure I remembered from the kitchen, den and bedroom of my youth. “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Victoria said — that’s her name, right, Victoria?”

I nodded.

“She said you were feeling sick, the flu or something,” and he let it trail off. Somebody shouted, “You should have seen it in December!” and the string quartet choked off in an insectlike murmur of busy strings and nervous fingers. “Cute kid, Victoria,” he said. “She’s something.” And then a stab at a joke: “Guess you inherited my taste, huh?”

But the dutiful son didn’t smile, let alone laugh. He was feeling less like Achates than Oedipus.

“You need any money?” my father said, and he was reaching into the pocket of his jeans, an automatic gesture, when the rest of the group converged on us and the question fell dead. He threw an arm round me suddenly and managed to snag Victoria and the proud flag of her hair in the other. He gave a two-way squeeze with his skinny arms and said, “See you at the reading tonight, right?”

Everyone was watching, right on down to the busboys, not to mention the biographer, Dr. Delpino and all the by-now stunned, awed and grinning strangers squinting up from their coquilles and fritures. It was a real biographical moment. “Yeah,” I said, and I thought for a minute they were going to break into applause, “sure.”

—

The hall was packed, standing room only, hot and stifled with the crush of bodies and the coats and scarves and other paraphernalia that were like a second shadowy crowd gathered at the edges of the living and breathing one, students, faculty and townspeople wedged into every available space. Some of them had come from as far away as Vermont and Montreal, so I heard, and when we came through the big main double doors, scalpers were selling the $2.50 Student Activities Board — sponsored tickets for three and four times face value. I sat in the front row between my father’s vacant seat and the biographer (whose name was Mal, as in Malcolm) while my father made the rounds, pumping hands and signing books, napkins, sheets of notebook paper and whatever else the adoring crowd thrust at him. Victoria, the mass of her hair enlarged to even more stupendous proportions thanks to some mysterious chemical treatment she’d undergone in the bathroom down the hall from her room, sat sprouting beside me.

I was trying not to watch my father, plunging in and out of the jungle of Victoria to make small talk, unconcerned, unflappable, no problem at all, when Mal leaned across the vacant seat and poked my arm with the butt of his always handy Scripto pen. I turned to him, Victoria’s hand clutched tightly in mine — she hadn’t let go, not even to unwrap her scarf, since we’d climbed out of the car — and stared into the reflected blaze of his glasses. They were amazing, those glasses, like picture windows, like a scuba mask grafted to his hairless skull. “Nineteen eighty-nine,” he said, “when he wrecked the car? The BMW, I mean?” I sat there frozen, waiting for the rest of it, the man’s voice snaking into my consciousness till it felt like the voice of my innermost self. “Do you remember if he was still living at home then? Or was that after he… after he, uh, moved out?”

Moved out. Wrecked the car.

“Do you remember what he was like then? Were there any obvious changes? Did he seem depressed?”

He must have seen from my face how I felt about the situation because his glasses suddenly flashed light, he tugged twice at his lower lip, and murmured, “I know this isn’t the time or place, I was just curious, that’s all. But I wonder, would you mind — maybe we could set up a time to talk?”

What could I say? Victoria clutched my hand like a trophy hunter, my fellow students rumbled and chattered and stretched in their bolted-down seats and my father squatted here, sprang up there, lifted his eyebrows and laid down a layer of witty banter about half a mile thick. I shrugged. Looked away. “Sure,” I said.

Then the lights dimmed once, twice, and went all the way down, and the chairman of the English Department took the podium while my father scuttled into the seat beside me and the audience hushed. I won’t bother describing the chairman — he was generic, and he talked for a mercifully short five minutes or so about how my father needed no introduction and et cetera, et cetera, before giving the podium over to Mal, as in Malcolm, the official hagiographer. Mal bounced up onto the stage like a trained seal, and if the chairman was selfless and brief, Mal was windy, verbose, a man who really craved an audience. He softened them up with half a dozen anecdotes about the great man’s hyperinflated past, with carefully selected references to drug abuse, womanizing, unhinged driving and of course movies and movie stars. By the time he was done he’d made my father sound like a combination of James Dean, Tolstoy and Enzo Ferrari. They were thrilled, every last man, woman and drooling freshman — and me, the only one in the audience who really knew him? I wanted to puke, puke till the auditorium was filled to the balcony, puke till they were swimming in it. But I couldn’t. I was trapped, just like in some nightmare. Right there in the middle of the front row.