T. Boyle: T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

He gently reminded her that the book was set in the nineteen thirties.

“Of course. What I mean is it’s not nineteenth century, it’s not Russia. ”

“No,” he agreed, “it’s not.” It was about then that he noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. And that her eyes, for all the coiled springboard of theories and embroidery, vegetarian cookery, cats and poetry he saw lurking there, were really quite beautiful. Stunning, actually. And her mouth. She had a sensual mouth, full-lipped, just like the one he’d imagined for Maggie. And though she was thin, too thin for his taste, she had a pair of breasts on her. There they were, clamped in the grip of the tight pink angora sweater she was wearing, and what was he thinking? That skinny women, skinny literary women with full lips and syntactical adulation shining in their eyes, could be lavishly receptive in another arena altogether. And further: that he’d had a scare, a bad scare, and could do with a little soothing.

He was about to lay his hand on hers when she suddenly pulled back to pantomime a smack to her forehead. “Oh, my God, I almost forgot,” she said, and then he was studying the crown of her skull, the parting there, as she bent to her purse, which she’d tucked away beneath the table when they’d sat down. In the next moment she was straightening up, slightly flushed from the effort, and smiling so forcefully her teeth shone. “Here,” she said, and she was handing what he at first took to be a breadboard across the table — the plaque, the plaque, of course — and along with it an envelope embossed with the logo of the Greater Stuyvesant Chamber of Commerce. “God, if I’d forgotten…”

He must have looked surprised — he’d been through an emotional wringer, but not, he reminded himself, anything even close to the sort of horror that poor abused kid must have endured, and he didn’t give a damn what anybody thought, whether it was random chance that had put him there or not, he was a hero, he was, and he’d suffered for it — because she said, “I know it’s not much. Especially, well, considering.”

“It’s plenty,” he said, and was he tearing up? “And I want to thank you, all of you, but you especially, you, Donna, from the bottom of my…” He lifted his head, cast a watery eye on the shadow of the waitress drifting by on the periphery. “But what I’d really like, what I need, that is, I mean after all we’ve been through together — oh, hell, let me just come out and say it. Do you want to come up to the room with me?”

He watched her smile retract, lips tightening like wire. “I’m seeing somebody,” she said.

He was desperate. He’d been in jail. He’d never even got to deliver his speech. “He doesn’t have to know.”

“I’m sorry,” she said firmly and then she got up from the table. “I’ll take care of the check,” she added in a softer voice, and touched his hand in parting. The smile flickered back. “Sleep tight.”

He staggered up the stairs to his second-floor room like an octogenarian, as drained as he’d ever been in his life. For a long while he fumbled with the card key, trying it forwards, backwards, upside down, till finally the light went mercifully green and he was inside. The room was like any other. Stucco walls, beige lampshades, plastic night tables with some sort of fake wood-grain pattern worked in beneath the surface. Industrial carpeting. Sheets and blankets stretched tight as drumskin over the bed by immigrant women who’d seen too much in their own place and time and now had to rake through the daily leavings of the class of people who had the wherewithal to couple here and gulp booze and do drugs and clip their nails over the sink. He didn’t want to think about the women’s children and the hopes they might have had for them, about the boy and the big man and a room just like this one in Chicago or Detroit or wherever the bad people, the very bad people, did what they were going to do.

He went to the window and looked out into a vast parking lot, a great dark sinkhole illuminated by the sad yellow light of the arc lamps rising hazily out of it. It took him a moment, his reflection caught there in the window, his jacket like a dead thing wrapped around him, to realize it was snowing. Or no, this was sleet, definitely sleet, the storm that had hit Buffalo finally caught up with him.

—

In the morning, he took the train back, and if he lifted his head from the newspaper when anyone came down the aisle, it was a reflex only. The rails thumped beneath him with a pulverizing regularity that seemed to work so deeply inside him it was as if he were being eviscerated with each thrust of the wheels. His breath fogged the window. He tried Tim McNeil’s novel again and again it put him to sleep. Back at home, Caroline seemed to find the whole business hilarious and he just couldn’t summon the strength to give her the hard truth of it. Still, she did warm to him when they went out to Eladio and blew the two-hundred-fifty-dollar honorarium on abalone flown in from California, Kobe beef and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Demi-Sec chilled to perfection. Two days later he learned from the newspaper that the boy’s name was Efraín Silva and that he’d wandered away from his mother at the Home Depot in Amherst and was now reunited with her, though there seemed to be some question regarding her legal status, which had only come to light because of her going to the police. As for the abductor, the big man in the pressed pants and checked jacket, he was still at large, and whether he was Russian or Croatian or Fijian for that matter, no one knew. No one knew his name either. All they knew was what he’d done to the boy and where he’d done it and they knew too that he’d do it again to some other boy in some other place.

If Riley felt a vague unease in the coming days, he chalked it up to the cold he seemed to have caught somewhere along the line. And when the next invitation came — from Kipper College of the Dunes in Kipper, Oregon, informing him that he was one of three finalists for the Evergreen Award in Creative Literature for his novel Magpie of the Farm —he didn’t show it to Caroline or anyone else. He just went in through the house to the fireplace, stacked up the kindling there, and used the creamy soft vellum to guide the flame of the match into the very heart of the fire.

(2012)

It rained all that September, a grim cold bleached-out rain that found the holes in the roof and painted the corners with a black creeping mold that felt greasy to the touch. Heat would have dried it up, or at least curtailed it, but there was no heat — or insulation either — because this was a summer rental, the price fixed for the season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and the season was over. Long over. Back in May, when Nora was at school out west and I’d sent her a steady stream of wheedling letters begging her to come back to me, I’d described the place as a cottage. But it wasn’t a cottage. It was a shack, a converted chicken coop from a time long gone, and the landlord collected his rent in summer, then drained the pipes and shut it down over the winter so that everything in it froze to the point where the mold died back and the mice, disillusioned, moved on to warmer precincts.

In the summer, we’d been outside most of the time, reading and lazing in the hammock till it got dark, after which we’d either listened to records or gone out to a club or to somebody’s house. We had a lot of friends — my friends, that is, people I’d grown up with — and we could just show up anytime, day or night, and get a party going. On weekends, I’d unfold the geological survey maps of Fahnestock or Harriman Park and we’d pick out a lake in the middle of nowhere and hike in to see what it looked like in the shimmering world of color and movement. Almost always we’d have it to ourselves, and we’d swim, sunbathe, pass a joint and a bota bag of sweet red wine and make love under the sun while the trees swayed in the breeze and the only sound was the sound of the birds. Nora didn’t have a tan line all summer. Neither did I.