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

She was already slipping her feet back into the shoes. “No, no thanks — I’ve got to go,” she said, rising to her feet. “But thanks for the beer and all — and if they do come around with a petition, you tell them we’re not doing anything wrong, okay?” She was smiling, swaying slightly over her heels. “And I don’t know if you’re into it — you’re online, right? — but you should check us out, see for yourself.”

We were at the door. She handed me the empty beer bottle, still warm from the embrace of her hand. “You really should,” she said.

—

After she left, I opened another beer and wandered through the downstairs rooms, picking up magazines and tossing them back down again, opening and shutting doors for no good reason, until I found myself in the kitchen. There were dishes in the sink, pans encrusted with one thing or another on the stove. The drainboard looked like an artifact, the one incomprehensible object left behind by a vanished civilization, and was it merely decorative or was it meant for some utilitarian purpose? The windows were a smudge of light. The plants needed water. I’d been planning to make myself an omelet and then go up to the university for the Monday Night Film Society’s showing of The Seventh Seal, a film so bleak it always brought tears of hysterical laughter to my eyes, but instead, on an impulse, I dialed Stefania’s number. When she answered, there was an edge to her voice, all the Russian smoke blown right out of it by the winds of complexity and turmoil, and in the background I could hear the children shrieking as if the skin were being peeled from their bodies in long, tapering strips. “Hello?” Stefania demanded. “Who is it? Is anybody there? Hello?” Very carefully, though my hand was trembling, I replaced the receiver in its cradle.

And this was strange: it was my day off, the only day of the week when I could really relax, and yet I was all worked up, as if I’d had one too many cups of coffee. I found myself drifting through the house again, thoughtfully pulling at my beer, studying a lamp or a painting or an old family photo as if I’d never seen it before, all the while making a wide circuit around the little room off the front hall where the computer sat on my desk like a graven idol. I resisted it for half an hour or more, until I realized I was resisting it, and then I sat down, booted it up and clicked on www.peephall.com.

A Web page gradually took shape on the screen. I saw the house on the corner, a big shapeless stucco box against a neutral background, and in front of it, as the image filled in from top to bottom, the girls began to materialize. There were seven of them, squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder to fit in the frame, and they were dressed in low-cut tops and smiling as if they were selling lip gloss or plaque remover. Samantha was second from the left, staring right at me. “ Twenty-four hours a day! ” screamed the teaser. “ Watch our young sexy College Girls take bubble baths, throw sexy Lingerie parties and sunbathe Nude poolside! You’ll never miss an Intimate Moment! ” To the left, in a neat pulsating sidebar, were come-ons for related sites, like See Me Pee and Hot Sexy Teen Vixens. The subscription fee was $36 a month. I never hesitated.

Once I was in, I was presented with an array of choices. There were forty cameras in all, and I could choose among the two bathrooms, three bedrooms, the pool, kitchen, living room and deck. I was working on my third beer — on an empty stomach, no less — and I wasn’t really thinking, just moving instinctively toward something I couldn’t have defined. My pulse was racing. I felt guilty, paranoiac, consumed with sadness and lust. The phrase dirty old man shot through my head, and I clicked on “The Kitchen” because I couldn’t go to “Upstairs Bath,” not yet anyway.

The room that came into view was neat, preternaturally neat, like the set for a cooking show, saucepans suspended from hooks, ceramic containers of flour, sugar, tea and coffee lined up along a tile counter, matching dishtowels hanging from two silver loops affixed to the cabinet beneath the sink. But of course it was a set, the whole house was a set, because that was what this was all about: seeing through walls like Superman, like God. I clicked on Camera 2, and suddenly a pair of shoulders appeared on the screen, female shoulders, clad in gray and with a blond ponytail centered in the frame. The shoulders ducked out of view, came back again, working vigorously, furiously, over something, and now the back of a blond head was visible, a young face in profile, and I experienced my first little frisson of discovery: she was beating eggs in a bowl. The sexy young teen college vixens were having omelets for dinner, just like me… but no, another girl was there now, short hair, almost boyish, definitely not Samantha, and she had a cardboard box in her hand, and they were — what were they doing? — they were making brownies. Brownies. I could have cried for the simple sweet irreducible beauty of it.

That night — and it was a long night, a night that stretched on past the declining hours and into the building ones — I never got out of the kitchen. Samantha appeared at twenty past six, just as the blonde (Traci) pulled the brownies from the oven, and in the next five minutes the entire cast appeared, fourteen hands hovering over the hot pan, fingers to mouths, fat dark crumbs on their lips, on the front of their T-shirts and clingy tops, on the unblemished tiles of the counter and floor. They poured milk, juice, iced tea, Coke, and they flowed in and out of chairs, propped themselves up against the counter, the refrigerator, the dishwasher, every movement and gesture a revelation. And more: they chattered, giggled, made speeches, talked right through one another, their faces animated with the power and fluency of their silent words. What were they saying? What were they thinking? Already I was spinning off the dialogue (“Come on, don’t be such a pig, leave some for somebody else!”; “Yeah, and who you think went and dragged her ass down to the store to pick up the mix in the first place?”), and it was like no novel, no film, no experience I’d ever had. Understand me: I’d seen girls together before, seen them talk, overheard them, and men and women and children too, but this was different. This was for me. My private performance. And Samantha, the girl who’d come up my walk in a pair of too-tight heels, was the star of it.

The next morning I was up at first light, and I went straight to the computer. I needed to shave, comb my hair, dress, eat, micturate; I needed to work on my novel, jog up and down the steps at the university stadium, pay bills, read the paper, take the car in for an oil change. The globe was spinning. People were up, alert, ready for the day. But I was sitting in a cold dark house, wrapped in a blanket, checking in on Peep Hall.

Nobody was stirring. I’d watched Samantha and the short-haired girl (Gina) clean up the kitchen the night before, sweeping up the crumbs, stacking plates and glasses in the dishwasher, setting the brownie pan out on the counter to soak, and then I’d watched the two of them sit at the kitchen table with their books and a boombox, turning pages, taking notes, rocking to the beat of the unheard music. Now I saw the pan sitting on the counter, a peach-colored band of sunlight on the wall behind it, plates stacked in the drainboard, the silver gleam of the microwave — and the colors weren’t really true, I was thinking, not true at all. I studied the empty kitchen in a kind of trance, and then, without ceremony, I clicked on “Upstairs Bath.” There were two cameras, a shower cam and a toilet cam, and both gazed bleakly out on nothing. I went to “Downstairs Bath” then, and was rewarded by a blur of motion as the stone-faced figure of one of the girls — it was Cyndi, or no, Candi — slouched into the room in a flannel nightdress, hiked it up in back, and sat heavily on the toilet. Her eyes were closed — she was still dreaming. There was the sleepy slow operation with the toilet paper, a perfunctory rinsing of the fingertips, and then she was gone. I clicked on the bedrooms then, all three of them in succession, until I found Samantha, a gently respiring presence beneath a quilt in a single bed against the far wall. She was curled away from me, her hair spilled out over the pillow. I don’t know what I was feeling as I watched her there, asleep and oblivious, every creep, sadist, pervert and masturbator with thirty-six dollars in his pocket leering at her, but it wasn’t even remotely sexual. It went far beyond that, far beyond. I just watched her, like some sort of tutelary spirit, watched her till she turned over and I could see the dreams invade her eyelids.