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

He felt bad for Eunice, felt powerless and weak, felt dead, but he fought down the despair and tried to sit up again. Or his brain tried. The rest of him, aside from the sting of his sun-scorched face and the persistent ache of his knees and the shivers that shook him like a rag, seemed to belong to somebody else, some stranger he couldn’t communicate with. After a while, he gave it up and called out softly to his wife. There was no response. Then he was asleep, and the night came down to lie on him with all its crushing weight.

Toward morning he woke and saw that Eunice had managed to crawl a few feet away; if he rolled his eyes all the way to the left, he could just make her out, a huddled lump in the shining grass. He held his breath, fearing the worst, but then he heard her breathing — or snoring, actually — a soft glottal insuck of air followed by an even softer puff of exhalation. The birds started in then, recommencing their daily argument, and he saw that the sky had begun to grow light, a phenomenon he hadn’t witnessed in ages, not since he was in college and stayed up through the night bullshitting about women and metaphysics and gulping beer from the can.

He could shake it off then. Push himself up out of the damp grass, plow through ten flapjacks and half a dozen sausage links, and then go straight to class and after that to the gym to work out. He built himself up then, every day, with every repetition and every set, and there was the proof of it staring back at him in the weight-room mirror. But there was no building now, no collecting jazz albums and European novels, no worrying about brushing between meals or compound interest or life insurance or anything else. Now there was only this, the waiting, and whether you waited out here on the lawn like breakfast for the crows or in there in the recliner, it was all the same. Nothing mattered anymore but this. This was what it all came down to: the grass, the sky, the trumpet vine and the pepper tree, the wife with her bones shot full of air and her hip out of joint, the dog on the porch, the sun, the stars.

Stan Sadowsky had tried to block the door on him the day he came to take Eunice away, but he held his ground because he’d made up his mind and when he made up his mind he was immovable. “She doesn’t want to be with you anymore, Stan,” he said. “She’s not going to be with you.”

“Yeah?” Stan’s neck was corded with rage and his eyes leapt right out of his head. Walt didn’t hate him. He didn’t feel anything for him, one way or the other. But there behind him, in the soft light of the hall, was Eunice, her eyes scared and her jaw set, wearing a print dress that showed off everything she had. “Yeah?” Stan repeated, barking it like a dog. “And what the fuck do you know about it?”

“I know this,” Walt said, and he hit him so hard he went right through the screen door and sprawled out flat on his back in the hallway. And when he got up, Walt hit him again.

But now, now there was the sun to contend with, already burning through the trees. He smelled the rich wet chlorophyll of the grass and the morning air off the sea, immemorial smells, ancient as his life, and when he heard the soft matitudinal thump of the paper in the front drive, he called out suddenly, but his voice was so weak he could scarcely hear it himself. Eunice was silent. Still and silent. And that worried him, because he couldn’t hear her snoring anymore, and when he found his voice again, he whispered, “Eunice, honey, give me your hand. Can you give me your hand?”

He could have sworn he saw her lift her shoulder and swivel toward him, her face alive and glowing with the early light, but he must have been fooling himself. Because when he summoned everything he had left in him and somehow managed to reach out his hand, there was nothing there.

(1997)

I like my privacy. My phone is unlisted, my mailbox locks with a key, and the gate across the driveway automatically shuts behind me when I pull in. I’ve got my own little half-acre plot in the heart of this sunny little university town, and it’s fenced all the way round. The house is a Craftsman-era bungalow, built in 1910, and the yard is lush with mature foliage, including the two grand old oaks that screen me from the street out front, a tsunami of Bougainvillea that long ago swallowed up the chainlink on both sides of the place, half a dozen tree ferns in the fifteen-foot range, and a whole damp, sweet-earth-smelling forest of pittosporum, acacia, and blue gum eucalyptus crowding out what’s left of the lawn.

When I sit on the porch in the afternoon, all I see is twenty shades of green, and when someone bicycles by or the couple across the way get into one of their biweekly wrangles, I’m completely invisible, though I’m sitting right here with my feet propped up, taking it all in. I haven’t been to a concert or a sporting event for as long as I can remember, or even a play or the movies, because crowds irritate me, all that jostling and hooting, the bad breath, the evil looks, not to mention the microbes hanging over all those massed heads like bad money on a bad bet. And no, I’m not a crank. I’m not crazy. And I’m not old, or not particularly (I’ll be forty-one in November). But I do like my privacy, and I don’t think there’s any crime in that, especially when you work as hard as I do. Once I pull my car into the driveway, I just want to be left alone.

Six nights a week, and two afternoons, I stir mojitos and shake martinis at the El Encanto Hotel, where I wear a bowtie and a frozen smile. I don’t have any pets, I don’t like walking, my parents are dead, and my wife — my ex -wife — may as well be. When I’m not at the El Encanto, I read, garden, burn things in a pan, clean spasmodically, and listen to whatever the local arts station is playing on the radio. When I feel up to it, I work on my novel (working title, Grandma Rivers ) — either that or my master’s thesis, “Claustrophobia in Franz Kafka’s Fictive Universe,” now eleven years behind schedule.

I was sitting on the porch late one afternoon — a Monday, my day off, the sun suspended just above the trees, birds slicing the air, every bud and flower entertaining its individual bee — when I heard a woman’s voice raised in exasperation from the porch next door. She was trying to reel herself in, fighting to keep her voice from getting away from her, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. The woman’s voice rose and fell, and then I recognized the voice of my next-door neighbor saying something in reply, something curt and dismissive, punctuated by the end stop of the front door slamming shut.

Next it was the sharp hammer-and-anvil ring of spike heels on pavement— toing, toing, toing —as they retreated down the Schusters’ macadam driveway, turned left on the sidewalk, and halted at my gate, which was, of course, locked. I was alert now in every fiber. I slipped a finger between the pages of the novel I’d been reading and held my breath. I heard the gate rattle, my eyes straining to see through the dense leathery mass of the oaks, and then the voice called, “Hello, hello, hello! ” It was a young voice, female, a take-charge and brook-no-nonsense sort of voice, a very attractive voice, actually, but for some reason I didn’t reply. Habit, I suppose. I was on my own porch in my own yard, minding my own business, and I resented the intrusion, no matter what it turned out to be, and I had no illusions on that score either. She was selling something, circulating a petition, organizing a Neighborhood Watch group, looking for a lost cat; she was out of gas, out of money, out of luck. I experienced a brief but vivid recollection of the time the gardener had left the gate ajar and a dark little woman in a sari came rushing up the walk holding a balsawood replica of the Stars & Stripes out in front of her as if it were made of sugar-frosted air, looked me in the eye, and said, “P’raps maybe you buy for a hunnert dollah good coin monee?”