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

“So what’s new?” I asked. “Anything interesting out there?”

“Well, duh, ” she said. “Haven’t you been reading the paper? Things are going through the roof — my last two listings sold the day they came on the market. For above asking.” She was wearing a yellow sun visor and a white cotton tennis dress. Her eyes jumped out at me as if they held more than they could contain. She wasn’t aggressive, or not exactly, but she never seemed far off message.

“What about that place on Runyon?” I asked. “That ever sell?”

“Why? You interested?” She was giving me a coy look, dropping one hand to tug at the hem of her skirt as if to draw my attention there. She had great legs, her best asset, tanned and honed by countless hours of tennis and power-walking. I realized I’d never seen her in a pair of pants, but then why would I? Her standard outfit was a skirt and heels and a blouse cut just low enough to keep the husbands interested while the wives paced off the living room to determine where the hutch was going to go.

She held the look just a beat too long. “Because Chrissie never said a word. But that’s a prime piece of property, two blocks closer to the beach than your place, and with better views — or potential views. I’ll tell you, that’s where I’d build my dream house if I had the wherewithal. Or the peace of mind.” This was a reference to the fact that her life was unsettled now that she’d separated from her husband and moved into a condo with views of nothing.

I shrugged. “Just curious.”

“I’ll show it to you if you want.” A door eased shut upstairs and here was Chrissie coming down the staircase in her walking shorts, her own legs long and bare and shining like tapered candles in the light from the open doorway. Mary Ellen shot me a look. “Tomorrow? Say, four?”

—

I went in the front door this time, Mary Ellen Stovall leading the way. The first room we entered, just off the hallway, was a den, wood-paneled, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled not with books but CDs, thousands of them, and on the bottom two shelves, running along all four walls, records — old-fashioned vinyl records in their original jackets. Mary Ellen flicked on an overhead light and the spines leapt out at me, dazzling slashes of color in every shade conceivable. There were speakers, an amp, turntable and CD player, and a single ergonomic chair covered in black velvet. This was his sanctum, I realized, the place where he came to listen.

“He had quite a collection,” Mary Ellen said, clicking across the parquet floor in her heels to pull out a CD at random. “‘Throbbing Gristle,’” she read, turning it over in her hand so that the cover flashed like a beacon. “Ever hear of them?”

“No,” I said.

“Not your kind of music, is it?”

“Not so much, no.”

“But listen, if you see anything you want, go ahead and take it, because aside from the piano, which I’ve got somebody coming in to pick up — and the appliances for the recycler — the rest is going to the dump. I mean, the brother doesn’t want it and since there’s no other heirs…” She gestured with the CD to complete the thought, then slid it back in its place on the shelf.

“I thought he had a daughter?”

“Not that I know of. But don’t you want to see the rest of the place? Just out of curiosity?” She paused, took a moment to cross one ankle in front of the other and tap her heel so that the sound, faint as it was, seemed to etch its way into the silence. “Of course, the house has got to go — that goes without saying. But it’s a steal, a real steal at the price. And you can’t beat the location.”

“Yes, definitely,” I said. “But give me a minute — you go on ahead.”

What I was thinking was that the 1982 volume of Carey Fortunoff’s journals didn’t have to go back at all and that if I wanted to I could just waltz out the door with any one I liked. Or better yet, now that I had a legitimate purpose in being here, I could come in at my leisure and read through them all. But then why would I want to? He was nothing to me. In fact — and here I bent to leaf through the records — I’d never even heard his music, not a note. The records, incidentally, were alphabetized, and I went through the M’s pretty thoroughly (Metallica, Montrose, Motörhead and the like), thinking to put the Metalavox album on the turntable, just for my own interest, but I couldn’t find it. What I did find, up above on a separate shelf, was a complete set of CDs labeled by year in magic marker, each one featuring multiple discs with the names of the compositions neatly written out, Carey Fortunoff’s music ordered in the way he’d ordered the events of his life in the journals. I even found one that was called Alnilam.

Mary Ellen tapped down the hall, stuck her head in the door. “Come on, I want to show you the grand room, because that’s where the views are going to be once we get rid of all the undergrowth — or overgrowth or whatever you want to call it — and isn’t that just the worst shame about this place, that he let it go like that?” She sighed, ran a hand through her hair. “But to each his own, huh?”

I followed her up the hallway, her hips swaying over the high heels, until she paused at a closed doorway. “You might want to hold your nose,” she whispered, as if Carey Fortunoff were still in there, still doing whatever he’d been doing before the breath went out of him. “The master bedroom,” she mouthed. “I’ve never even opened the door. Really, I think I’m afraid to.”

And then we were in the grand room, the light muted and leafy. Mary Ellen went to the window as if she could see out across the channel to the islands, the million-dollar view (or in this case, more likely three- or four-million-dollar view) she would earn her commission on. I stood in the doorway, gazing at the bookcase, where the gap for the 1982 volume stood out like a missing tooth. I tried to be casual, moving toward it as if I’d never seen it before, as if I were a potential buyer contemplating a move to a better location, as if I weren’t some sort of hyena sniffing out the death of a neighbor I never knew, but then time seemed to compress and two things happened that continue to trouble me to this day.

The first was my discovery, in the gap on the shelf where it must have slipped out of the volume I’d removed, of a newspaper clipping, yellowed with age and dated August 16, 1982. The headline read, “Toddler Drowns in Russian River,” and below it: “The body of Teresa Fortunoff, age 3, was found by sheriff’s deputies late yesterday afternoon. The current had apparently swept the girl nearly a mile downriver from where she was first reported missing. The cause of death was given as drowning. She is survived by her parents, Carey Fortunoff, former member of the rock group Metalavox, and Pamela Perry Fortunoff, both of Los Angeles.”

Before I could absorb the shock of it — Carey had lied to me, to himself, to posterity — the purposive clack of Mary Ellen’s heels made me turn my head and I had a second shock (or surprise, I suppose, would be a better word). She’d stripped off her blouse and dropped her skirt right there on the floor. I saw that she was wearing an elaborate set of undergarments, in black lace, with matching garters, an arrangement that had taken some forethought. “I’m so lonely since Todd left,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around me. I felt the heat of her, smelled her perfume that rose and wafted and overwhelmed every other odor there was or ever had been. “Hold me,” she said, whispering still. And then, because I hadn’t reciprocated — or not yet — she added, “I won’t breathe a word.”

—

Carey Fortunoff’s last year wasn’t at all like what I’d imagined. He was in good health (but for a knee injury he’d sustained in a motorcycle accident twenty years back that left him with a slight limp), he was composing the score for a film being shot in Bulgaria and a record label was interested in bringing out an album that would collect the best of his songs, both the ones he’d written for himself and for other artists, including “Alnilam,” which had apparently been a top twenty hit for a band called Mucilage. He was sixty-two. Pamela was long gone. Francie too. But he had a new girlfriend he’d met online and he wrote passionately about her, in love — genuine love that went beyond the quick fix of sex, or at least that’s how I read it — for the first time in years. ( Just to be with her is all the heaven I need, put on a record, an old movie, just sit there holding hands. All gravy. ) If he had a problem it was with people, with society, with all the hurry and the wash of images, strange faces, the jabber of day-to-day life. Increasingly, he’d withdrawn into himself and his music, sleeping through the day and emerging only at night and only then to take care of the necessities, groceries and the like. Pickles. One percent milk. Root beer. He wore a hooded sweatshirt and dark glasses to hide his face. He let the trees and shrubs go mad.