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

When Mal finally ducked his denuded head and announced my father, the applause was seismic, as if the whole auditorium had been tipped on end, and the great man, in one of his own tour T-shirts and the omnipresent leather jacket, took the stage and engaged in a little high-fiving with the departing biographer while the thunder gradually subsided and the faces round me went slack with wonder. For the next fifteen minutes he pranced and strutted across the stage, ignoring the podium and delivering a preprogrammed monologue that was the equal of anything you’d see on late-night TV. At least all the morons around me thought so. He charmed them, out-hipped them, and they laughed, snorted, sniggered and howled. Some of them, my fellow freshmen, no doubt, even stamped their feet in thunderous unison as if they were at a pep rally or something. And the jokes — the sort of thing he’d come on with at lunch — were all so self-effacing, at least on the surface, but deep down each phrase and buttressed pause was calculated to remind us we were in the presence of one of the heroes of literature. There was the drinking-with-Bukowski story, which had been reproduced in every interview he’d done in the last twenty years, the traveling-through-Russia-with-nothing-but-a-pair-of-jeans-two-socks-and-a-leather-jacket-after-his-luggage-was-stolen story, the obligatory movie star story and three or four don’t-ask-me-now references to his wild past. I sat there like a condemned man awaiting the lethal injection, a rigid smile frozen to my face. My scalp itched, both nostrils, even the crotch of my underwear. I fought for control.

And then the final blow fell, as swift and sudden as a meteor shrieking down from outer space and against all odds blasting through the roof of the auditorium and drilling right into the back of my reeling head. My father raised a hand to indicate that the jokes were over, and the audience choked off as if he’d tightened a noose around each and every throat. Suddenly he was more professorial than the professors — there wasn’t a murmur in the house, not even a cough. He held up a book, produced a pair of wire-rim glasses — a prop if ever I saw one — and glanced down at me. “The piece I want to read tonight, from Blood Ties, is something I’ve wanted to read in public for a long time. It’s a deeply personal piece, and painful too, but I read it tonight as an act of contrition. I read it for my son.”

He spread open the book with a slow, sad deliberation I’m sure they all found very affecting, but to me he was like a terrorist opening a suitcase full of explosives, and I shrank into my seat, as miserable as I’ve ever been in my life. He can’t be doing this, I thought, he can’t. But he was. It was his show, after all.

And then he began to read. At first I didn’t hear the words, didn’t want to — I was in a daze, mesmerized by the intense weirdness of his voice, which had gone high-pitched and nasal all of a sudden, with a kind of fractured rhythm that made it seem as if he was translating from another language. It took me a moment, and then I understood: this was his reading voice, another affectation. Once I got past that, there were the words themselves, each one a little missile aimed at me, the hapless son, the victim who only wanted to be left lying in the wreckage where he’d fallen. He was reading a passage in which the guilt-racked but lusty father takes the fourteen-year-old son out to the best restaurant in town for a heart-to-heart talk about those lusts, about dreams, responsibilities and the domestic life that was dragging him down. I tried to close myself off, but I couldn’t. My eyes were burning. Nobody in the auditorium was watching him anymore — how could they be? No, they were watching me. Watching the back of my head. Watching the fiction come to life.

I did the only thing I could. When he got to the part where the son, tears streaming into his chocolate mousse, asks him why, why, Dad, why, I stood up, right there, right in the middle of the front row, all those eyes drilling into me. I tore my hand away from Victoria’s, stared down the biographer and Dr. Delpino and all the rest of them, and stalked straight out the nearest exit even as my father’s amplified voice wavered, faltered, and then came back strong again, nothing wrong, nothing the matter, nothing a little literature wouldn’t cure.

—

I don’t know what happened between him and Victoria at the muted and minimally celebratory dinner later that night, but I don’t suspect it was much, if anything. That wasn’t the problem, and both of us — she and I, that is — knew it. I spent the night hiding out in the twenty-four-hour laundromat wedged between Brewskies Pub and Taco Bell, and in the morning I ate breakfast in a greasy spoon only the townies frequented and then caught up on some of Hollywood’s distinguished product at the local cineplex for as long as I could stand it. By then, I was sure the great man would have gone on to his many other great appointments, all his public posturing aside. And that was just what happened: he canceled his first flight and hung around till he could hang around no longer, flying out at four-fifteen with his biographer and all the sympathy of the deeply yearning and heartbroken campus. And me? I was nobody again. Or so I thought.

I too dropped out of Dr. Delpino’s class — I couldn’t stand the thought of that glazed blue look of accusation in her eyes — and though I occasionally spotted Victoria’s hair riding the currents around campus, I avoided her. She knew where to find me if she wanted me, but all that was over, I could see that — I wasn’t his son after all. A few weeks later I noticed her in the company of this senior who played keyboards in one of the local bands, and I felt something, I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t jealousy. And then, at the end of a lonely semester in a lonely town in the lonely hind end of nowhere, the air began to soften and a few blades of yellow grass poked up through the rotting snow and my roommate took me downtown to Brewskies to celebrate.

The girl’s name was Marlene, but she didn’t pronounce it like the old German actress who was probably dead before she was born, but Mar- lenna, the second syllable banged out till it sounded as if she was calling herself Lenny. I liked the way her smile showed off the gold caps on her molars. The band I didn’t want to mention earlier was playing through the big speakers over the bar, and there was a whole undercurrent of noise and excitement mixed with the smells of tap beer, Polish sausage and salt-and-vinegar chips. “I know you,” she said. “You’re, um, Tim McNeil’s son, right?”

I never looked away from her, never blinked. All that was old news now, dead and buried, like some battle in the Civil War.

“That’s right,” I said. “How did you guess?”

(1999)

They wore each other like a pair of socks. He was at her house, she was at his. Everywhere they went — to the mall, to the game, to movies and shops and the classes that structured their days like a new kind of chronology — their fingers were entwined, their shoulders touching, their hips joined in the slow triumphant sashay of love. He drove her car, slept on the couch in the family room at her parents’ house, played tennis and watched football with her father on the big thirty-six-inch TV in the kitchen. She went shopping with his mother and hers, a triumvirate of tastes, and she would have played tennis with his father, if it came to it, but his father was dead. “I love you,” he told her, because he did, because there was no feeling like this, no triumph, no high — it was like being immortal and unconquerable, like floating. And a hundred times a day she said it too: “I love you. I love you.”