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

“I’m your neighbor,” the voice called, and the gate rattled again. “Come on,” she said, “I can see you, you know — I can see your feet — and I know you’re there. I just want to take a minute of your time, that’s all, just a minute—”

She could see me? Self-consciously I lifted my feet from the floorboards and propped them up on the rail. “I can’t,” I said, and my voice sounded weak and watered down, “I’m busy right now.”

The fraction of a moment passed, all the sounds of the neighborhood butting up against one another — crows cursing in the trees, a jet revealing itself overhead with the faintest distant whine of its engines, a leaf blower starting up somewhere — and then she sang out, “I like your shoes. Where’d you get them? Not in this town, right?”

I said nothing, but I was listening.

“Come on, just a minute, that’s all I ask.”

I may live alone, by preference, but don’t get me wrong, I’m no eunuch. I have the same needs and urges as other men, which I’ve been able to satisfy sporadically with Stefania Porovka, the assistant pastry chef at the hotel. Stefania is thirty-two, with a smoky deep Russian voice that falls somewhere in the range between magnetic and aphrodisiacal and two children in elementary school. The children are all right, as children go, aside from a little caterwauling when they don’t get their way (which seems to be about a hundred percent of the time), but I can’t manage to picture them in my house, and by the same token, I can’t picture myself in Stefania’s psychotically disordered two-bedroom walk-up. So what I’m saying is that I got up from the porch and ambled down the walk to the gate and the girl of twenty or so standing there in blue jeans, heels and a V-neck top.

She was leaning over the gate, her arms crossed at the wrists, rings glinting from her fingers. Her eyes and hair were the exact same shade of brown, as if the colors had been mixed in the same vat, which in a sense I guess they were, and she had unusually thick and expressive eyebrows of the same color. From where I was standing, five feet back from the locked gate, I could see down the front of her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere. “Hello,” I said, regaling her with a cautious nod and the same approximation of a smile I put on for my customers at the bar.

“Oh, hi, ” she returned, giving it the sort of emphasis that said she was surprised and impressed and very, very friendly. “I’m Samantha. I live up at the end of the block — the big white house with the red trim?”

I nodded. At this point I was noncommittal. She was attractive — pretty and beyond, actually — but too young for me to be interested in anything more than a neighborly way, and as I say, I wasn’t especially neighborly to begin with.

“And you are—?”

“Hart,” I said, “Hart Simpson,” and I put my hands on my hips, wondering if she could translate body language.

She never moved, but for a slight readjustment of her hands that set her bracelets ajingle. She was smiling now, her eyebrows arching up and away from the sudden display of her teeth. “Hart,” she repeated, as if my name were a curious stone she’d found in the street and was busy polishing on the sleeve of her blouse. And then: “Hart, are we bothering you? I mean, are we really bothering you all that much?”

I have to admit the question took me by surprise. Bothering me? I never even knew she existed until thirty seconds ago — and who was this we she was referring to? “ We? ” I said.

The smile faded, and she gave me a long, slow look. “So you’re not the one who complained — or one of the ones?”

“You must have me confused with somebody else. I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Peep Hall—” she said, “you know, like peephall.com? ”

It was warm, midsummer, the air charged with the scent of rosemary and lavender and the desiccated menthol of the eucalyptus trees. I felt the sun on my face. I slowly shook my head.

She rubbed the palms of her hands together as if she were washing with soap and water, shifted her eyes away, and then came back to me again. “It’s nothing dirty,” she said. “It’s not like it’s some sleazoid club with a bunch of Taiwanese businessmen shoving dollar bills up our crotches or we’re lap-dancing or anything like that — we don’t even take our clothes off that much, because that totally gets old—”

I still had no idea what she was talking about, but I was beginning to warm to the general drift of it. “Listen,” I said, trying to unhinge my smile a bit, “do you want to come in for a beer or maybe a glass of wine or something?”

—

My house — not the one I grew up in, but this one, the one I inherited from my grandmother — is a shrine to her conventional, turn-of-the-last-century taste, as well as a kind of museum of what my parents left behind when they died. There isn’t too much of me in it, but I’m not one for radical change, and the Stickley furniture, the mica lamps, and even the ashtrays and bric-a-brac are wearing well, as eternal as the king’s ankus or the treasure buried with Tutankhamen. I keep the place neat — my parents’ books commingled with my own on the built-in bookshelves, rugs squared off against the couches and chairs, cups and dishes neatly aligned in the glass-front cabinets — but it’s not particularly clean, I’m afraid. I’m not much for dusting. Or vacuuming. The toilets could use a little more attention. And the walls on either side of the fireplace feature long, striated, urine-colored stains where the water got in around the chimney flashing last winter.

“Nice place,” Samantha breathed as I handed her a beer and led her into the living room, the house as dark and cool as a wine cellar though it must have been ninety out there in the sun. She settled into the big oak chair by the window, kicked off her heels and took first one foot, then the other, into her hands and slowly rubbed it. “I hate heels,” she said, “especially these. But that’s what they want us to wear.”

I was having a beer too, and I cradled it in my lap and watched her.

“No running shoes — they hate running shoes — and no sweats. It’s in our contract.” She laughed. “But you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

I was thinking about Stefania and how long it had been since I’d had her over, how long it had been since she’d sat in that chair and done something as unselfconscious as rubbing her bare white feet and laughing over a beer. “Tell me,” I said.

It was a long story, involving so many digressions that the digressions became stories in themselves, but finally I began to gather that the big white house on the corner, where she lived with six other girls, was meant to represent a college dorm — that’s where the “Peep Hall” designation came in — and that the business of the place was to sell subscriptions on the Internet to overlathered voyeurs who could click on any time of day or night to watch the girls going about their business in living color. “So you’ve got all these video cameras around,” I said, trying to picture it. “Like at the bank or the 7-Eleven — that sort of thing?”

“Yeah, but much better quality, and instead of just like two of them or whatever, you’ve got cameras all over the place.”

“Even in the bathroom?”

Another laugh. “ Especially the bathroom, what do you think?”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I guess I was shocked. I was shocked. I definitely was. But why not admit it? I was titillated too. Women in the shower, I was thinking, women in the tub. I drained my beer, held the bottle up to the light, and asked her if she’d like another one.