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

Inside, the smell was more intense, as you might expect, but it wasn’t overpowering — there was a chemical component to it, an astringency, and I realized that the firemen must have used some sort of dispersal agent to contain the odor. Everything was dim, the windows overgrown, the shades pulled, the shadows intact. Very gradually — and it was absolutely still in that room, which turned out to be the kitchen — my eyes began to adjust and I was surprised to see that things were orderly enough, no cascading bags of garbage, no blackened pans piled up in a grease-smeared sink, no avocado skins strewn across the floor. Orderly — and ordinary too. He had the same sort of things in his kitchen we did, dishwasher, Viking range, coffee maker, refrigerator.

For a long while I just stood there, ignoring the voice in my head that advised me to get out, screamed at me to get out while I could, because if anybody should catch me here the humiliation factor would be off the scale, Neighbor Caught Looting Dead Rocker’s House, but then, almost as if I were working from a script, I crossed the room and pulled open the refrigerator door. The light blinked on and I saw the usual stuff arrayed there — catsup, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, horseradish, chunky peanut butter, pickles, a six-pack of Hires root beer. Half a dozen eggs resided in the sculpted plastic container built into the door. There was butter in the butter compartment and in the rack on the door a carton of one percent milk, expired. Did I actually unscrew the lid of the pickle jar, pluck one out with thumb and forefinger and savor the cold crunch of it between my teeth? I’m not sure. Maybe. Maybe I did.

Again, there was something operating in me here that I’m not proud of — that I wasn’t even in control of — and I’m telling you about it simply to get it down, get it straight, but really, what was the harm? I was curious, all right? Is curiosity a crime? And sympathetic too, don’t forget that. A thought flashed through my head — if those East Coast people could see me now they’d be the ones vetoing the arrangement and not me — but the thought crumpled like foil and in the next moment I was moving down the hall to the living room, or great room, as the realtors like to call it. Great or not, it was an expansive space with a raised ceiling that must have taken up a third of the square footage of the place and had once featured a view out to sea, where water and sky met in a shimmering translucent band that shrank and enlarged and changed color through all the phases of the day, the same view Chrissie and I enjoy, albeit more distantly, from our upstairs bedroom window. The shades hadn’t been drawn here, but there was nothing to see beyond the cascading leaves and the bare branchless knuckles of the shrubs pressed up against the glass.

There was a grand piano in one corner (Steinway, white) and across from it an electric version hooked up via a nest of wires to a pair of speakers that stood on either side of it. I had an impulse to lift the lid on the Steinway and try a key or two — and who in this world has ever entered a room with a piano and failed to go to it and tinkle out something, be it “Chopsticks” or the opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave”?—but I fought it down. The neighbors might have been behind an eight-foot wall but how could they fail to remark on the sound of a dead man playing the piano at six-thirty of a Sunday morning? No. No piano playing. Chrissie would be waking soon, the paper was still in the driveway and the croissants waiting. I had to go. Had to leave right this minute… but what was this on the walls, these rectangular forms giving back the soupy light? Photos. Framed photos.

A glance showed me I’d been wrong in identifying Carey Fortunoff as the brooder in the group photograph. Here was his face replicated in half a dozen discrete scenarios, with and without his bandmates; with a pair of rockers even I recognized, famous men; with a sweet-faced woman sporting teased blond hair and holding an infant daughter, her hair teased too — and I realized, by process of elimination, that he was the one in the original photo partially obscured by a tombstone and staring straight into the camera. Not as dynamic maybe as the one I’d mistaken him for or as good-looking either, but solid in his own way. I imagined him as the composer, the arranger, the mad genius behind the band, because didn’t every band, if it was to succeed at any level, require a mad genius?

I didn’t know. But suddenly I felt something, a presence, an aura, and I came back to myself. I needed to stop prying. I needed to leave. I needed croissants, coffee, my wife. And no, I had no interest in entering that bedroom down the hall or wherever it was. I turned to go, was actually on my way across the room and out the door, when my eye fell on the bookshelf, and if there’s an impulse every bit as compelling as to lift the lid on a piano and finger a few keys, it’s to inspect a bookcase, whether a friend’s or a stranger’s, just to get a sense of the titles some other person, someone other than you or your wife, would select and read. Without trying to sound overly dramatic, this was the moment where the fates intervened, because what drew my attention was a uniform set of leather-bound books, hand-numbered and dated. Journals. The journals of a third-tier musician who’d died alone in what sort of extremis I could only imagine — Carey Fortunoff’s journals. The one I picked at random was dated 1982, and I didn’t flip back the cover and leaf through it, because another impulse was at work in me, even stronger than the ones I’d already given way to.

I never hesitated. Ignoring the warning voices rattling round my head, I tucked the volume under my arm and slipped out the way I’d come.

—

I tried to be inconspicuous on the street, just another man — citizen, neighbor, innocent — heading down to the bakery in the early morning with a favorite book, but in any case there was no one around to doubt or question me. The walls stood tall and mute. A soft breeze swayed in the treetops. On the main road, the one that arcs gracefully through the lower village, a pair of cars, pinked by the early sun, rolled silently to a halt at the four-way stop sign, then rolled on. I bought the newspaper from one of the machines ranged like staring eyes outside the bakery, folded the book inside it, and went on up the steps and into the shop, where the smells were sweet and comforting.

Coffeed and croissanted, I took a table in back and made a show of studying the headlines before sliding the book out from between the Real Estate and Style sections. I won’t say my heart was hammering — it wasn’t — but I did feel the quickening pulse of an illicit thrill. I looked up. There were three other people in the place, aside from the girl behind the counter: two women and a man, each sitting separately, and each absorbed in laptop or phone. I didn’t recognize them — and if I didn’t recognize them, then they wouldn’t have recognized me. I opened the journal and spread it flat on the table.

The first page simply stated the date in bold black numerals three inches high. Beneath it was the leering cartoon figure of what I at first took to be a devil — horns, goatee, cloven hooves — and I was put off. Here was the same old pubescent trope: devils and grinning skulls, phallic snakes, witch women and graves, a kind of wet dream of death you saw in one form or another on every band poster of the era. But then I saw my mistake — the figure was actually meant to be that of a satyr, as indicated by the definition of satyriasis written out in block letters at the bottom of the page: Excessive or abnormal sexual craving in the male. Which was at least more interesting. I turned the page.