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

What did we talk about? The usual, bands, drugs, what concerts we’d been to, but then we started in on books and I was pleased and surprised because most of the people I ran into in that time and place didn’t extend themselves much beyond the Sunday comics. We were debating some fine point of Slaughterhouse Five, testing each other’s bona fides — he could quote passages from memory, a talent I’ve never had — when Nora leaned in between us to brush a kiss to my lips, then straightened up and shook out her hair with a quick neat flip of her head. “My heels are killing me,” she said. “And this top — Jesus, I’m freezing.” She stole a look around, gave Steve a vacant smile, picked up my drink and downed it in a single gulp. Then she was gone, back to her post at the station by the door.

Steve gave a low whistle. “Wow,” he said. “That your old lady?”

I just shrugged, nonchalant, elevated in that instant above everybody in the place. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but something stirred in me whenever I looked up and saw the way the men watched her as she tapped across the floor in her heels, trailing husbands and wives and sometimes even kids behind her, but it wasn’t something good or admirable.

“Man, I’d love to—” he began, and then caught himself. “You are one lucky dude.”

Another shrug. My feelings were complicated. I’d been drinking. And what I said next was inexcusable, I know that, and I didn’t mean it, not in any literal sense, not in the real world of twin beds and Persian carpets and all the rest, but what I was trying to convey here was that I wasn’t tied down— old lady —wasn’t a husband, not yet anyway, and that all my potentialities were intact. “I don’t know,” I said, “she can be a real pain in the ass.” I took a sip of my drink, let out a long withering sigh. “Sometimes I think she’s more trouble than she’s worth, know what I mean?”

That was all I said, or some variant of it, and then there was another drink and the conversation went deeper and I guess somehow Steve must have got the impression that we weren’t really all that committed, that living together was an experiment gone sour, that we were both — she and I — on the brink of something else. There was an exchange of phone numbers and addresses ( Birnam Wood? Cool. I used to swim in the lake there when I was a kid ) and then he was gone and the crowd at the bar began to thin. The minute he left I forgot him. Next thing I knew, Nora was there, dressed in her long coat and her knit hat and gloves, perched high on the platform of her heels.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

She gave me a tired smile. “Have fun?”

“Yeah.” I smiled back.

“Did you know it’s snowing out?”

“Really?”

“Really.” And then a beat. “You want me to drive?”

—

It was a long way home, twenty, twenty-five minutes under the best of conditions, but with the snow and the worn tires and the fact that Nora didn’t see too well at night, it must have taken us twice as long as that. We were the only ones on the road. The snow swept at the headlights and erased everything out in front of us. I tried not to be critical but every time we went around a curve the car sailed out of control and I suppose I got vocal about it because at one point she pulled over, her lips drawn tight and her eyes furious in the sick yellow glare of the dashboard. “You want to drive?” she said. “Go ahead, be my guest.”

When we got home (finally, miraculously), the phone was ringing. I could hear it from outside the door, making its demands. It took me a minute, pinning a glove under one arm and struggling to work the key in the lock as the snow sifted down and Nora stamped impatiently. “Hurry up, I have to pee,” she said between clenched teeth. Then we were in, the phone ringing still — it must have been the sixth or seventh ring — and I flicked on the lights while Nora made a dash for the bathroom and I crossed the room to answer it.

“Hello?” I gasped, out of breath and thinking it must be Artie, because who else would be calling at that hour?

“Hey, what’s happening,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “This Keith?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“Steve.”

“Steve?”

“From the bar, you know. Like earlier? Brennan’s?” I heard Nora flush the toilet. The cover was off the pool table because I’d left in the middle of the climactic match between Player A and Player B, all the angles still in play. I listened to the water rattle in the pipes. And then Steve’s voice, low, confidential, “Hey, I was just wondering. Is Nora there?”

The bathroom door clicked open. There was a buzzing in my skull. Everything was wrong. “No,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis though there was no one there to see it, “she’s not in.”

“When’ll she be back?”

I said nothing. I watched her swing open the bathroom door, saw her face there, the pristine towels on the rack and the copper-and-gold wallpaper Mrs. Kuenzli must have gone to some special store to pick out because she wanted the best, only the best. The voice on the other end of the line was saying something else, insinuating, whispering in my ear like a disease, and so I bent down to where the phone was plugged into the wall and pulled it out of the socket.

“Who was that?” Nora asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “Wrong number.”

She gave me a doubtful look. “You were on the line long enough.”

I wanted to do something right for a change, wanted to take hold of her and press her to me, confess, tell her I loved her, but I didn’t. I just said, “You feel like a game of pool? I’ll spot you two balls—”

“You play,” she said. “I’m beat. I think I’ll get ready for bed and read for a while.” She paused at the bedroom door to give me a sweet tired smile. “You’ve got to admit, Player B’s a lot better than I am anyway.”

No argument there. I turned on the light over the table, cued up a record and took up the game where I’d left off. I was deep into my third game, on a real roll on behalf of Player A, the balls dropping as if I didn’t even have to use the stick, as if I were willing them in, when suddenly there was a knock at the door. Two thumps. A pause. And then two thumps more.

I was just laying down the stick, any number of scenarios going through my head — it was a stranded motorist, the guy who drove the snowplow come to complain about the tail end of the car sticking out into the street, Artie braving the elements for a nightcap — when Nora came out of the bedroom, looking puzzled. She was in her pajamas, the kind kids wear, with a drawstring round the waist and a fold-down collar. Pink. With a flight of bluebirds running up and down her limbs and flapping across her chest. Her feet were bare. “Who’s that?” she asked. “Artie?”

I didn’t know what was coming, couldn’t have guessed. I was in my own house, shooting pool and listening to music while the snow fell outside and the furnace hummed and my girlfriend stood there in her pajamas. “Must be,” I said, even as the knock came again and a voice, muffled by the door, called out, “Keith? Nora? Knock-knock. Anybody home?”

I opened the door on Steve, his hair matted now and wet with snow. He was holding a bottle of tequila by the neck and raised it in offering as he stamped in through the door. “Hey,” he said, handing me the bottle, “cool place.” He shrugged out of his jacket, dropping it right there on the floor. “Anybody down for a little action? Nora, how about you? A shot? Want to do a shot?”

She looked at him, bewildered — or maybe it was just that she wasn’t wearing her glasses and had to squint to take him in. I just stood there, the bottle like a brick in my hand — or no, a cement block, a weight, avoirdupois, dragging me down.