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

I shot my eyes left, then right, up and down the bar. All the drinks were fresh, and no one was paying us the least attention. “What do you mean?”

Her eyebrows lifted, the silky thick eyebrows that were like two strips of mink pasted to her forehead, and her hair was like some exotic fur too, rich and shining and dark. “You didn’t check out the Web site?”

“No,” I lied.

“Well, you ought to,” she said. The air was a stew of smells — a couple at the end of the bar were sharing the warm spinach and scallop salad, there was the sweet burned odor of the Irish whiskey I was sipping from a mug, Samantha’s perfume (or was it Megan’s?) and a medley of mesquite-grilled chops and braised fish and Peter Oxendine’s famous sauces wafting in from the kitchen. “Okay,” she said, shaking out her hair with a flick of her head and running a quick look around the place before bringing her eyes back to me. “Okay, well — I just wanted to say thanks.” She shrugged. “I guess I better be getting back to the girls.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Nice seeing you again. And hey, happy birthday.”

She’d already turned away from the bar, earrings swaying, face composed, but she stopped to give me a smile over her shoulder, and then she made her way across the room and out onto the darkened patio.

And that would have been it, at least until I could get home and watch her shimmy out of that gown and paint her toenails or gorge on cake or whatever it was she was going to do in the semi-privacy of her own room, but I couldn’t let it go and I sent over dessert too, a truly superior raspberry-kiwi tart Stefania had whipped up that afternoon. That really put them in my debt, and after dessert the three of them came to the bar to beam at me and settle in for coffee and an after-dinner drink. “You’re really just twenty-one today?” I said, grinning at Samantha till the roots of my teeth must have showed. “You’re sure I don’t have to card you, now, right?”

I watched the hair swirl round her shoulders as she braced herself against the bar and reached down to ease off her heels, and then she was fishing through her purse till she came up with her driver’s license and laid it out proudly on the bar. I picked it up and held it to the light — there she was, grinning wide out of the bottom right-hand corner, date of birth clearly delineated, and her name, Jennifer B. Knickish, spelled out in bold block letters. “Jennifer?” I said.

She took the card back with a frown, her eyebrows closing ranks. “Everybody calls me Samantha,” she said. “Really.” And to her companions: “Right, guys?” I watched them nod their glossy heads. The older one, the sister, giggled. “And besides, I don’t want any of the creeps to know my real name — even my first name — you know what I mean?”

Oh, yes, yes I did. And I smiled and bantered and called up reserves of charm I hadn’t used in years, and the drinks were on me all night long. It was Samantha’s birthday, wasn’t it? And her twenty-first, no less — a rite of passage if ever there was one. I poured Grand Marnier and Rémy till the customers disappeared and the waiters and busboys slipped out the back and the lights drew down to nothing.

—

I woke with a headache. I’d matched them, round for round, and, as I say, I’d started in on the Irish whiskey earlier in the night — and yes, I’m all too well aware that the concrete liver and stumbling tongue are hazards of the profession, but I’m pretty good at keeping all that in check. I do get bored, though, and wind up overdoing it from time to time, especially when the novel isn’t going well, and it hadn’t been going well in a long while. The problem was, I couldn’t get past the initial idea — the setup — which was a story I’d come across in the newspaper two or three years ago. It had to do with an old woman’s encounter with the mysterious forces of nature (I don’t recall her real name, not that it would matter, but I called her Grandma Rivers, to underscore the irony that here was a woman with eight children, thirty-two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren and she was living alone in a trailer park in a part of the country so bleak no one who wasn’t condemned to it would ever even deign to glance down on it from the silvered window of a jetliner at thirty-five thousand feet). One night, when the wind was sweeping up out of the south with the smell of paradise on it and all her neighbors were mewed up in their aluminum boxes lulled by booze, prescription drugs and the somnolent drone of the tube, she stepped outside to take in the scent of the night and indulge in a cigarette (she always smoked outside so as not to pollute the interior of her own little aluminum box set there on the edge of the scoured prairie). No sooner had she lit up than a fox — a red fox, Vulpes fulva —shot out of the shadows and latched onto her ankle. In the shock and confusion of that moment, she lurched back, lost her balance and fell heavily on her right side, dislocating her hip. But the fox, which later proved to be rabid, came right back at her, at her face this time, and the only thing she could think to do in her panic was to seize hold of it with her trembling old arms and pin it beneath her to keep the snapping jaws away from her.

Twelve hours. That’s how long she lay there, unable to move, the fox snarling and writhing beneath her, its heartbeat joined to hers, its breathing, the eloquent movement of its fluids and juices and the workings of its demented little vulpine brain, until somebody — a neighbor — happened to glance beyond the hedge and the hump of the blistered old Jeep Wagoneer her late husband had left behind to see her there, stretched out in the gravel drive like a strip of discarded carpet. Yes. But what then? That was what had me stumped. I thought of going back and tracing her life up to that point, her girlhood in the Depression, her husband’s overseas adventures in the war, the son killed in Vietnam… or maybe just to let her sink into the background while I focused on the story of the community, the benighted neighbors and their rat-faced children, so that the trailer park itself became a character….

But, as I say, I woke with a headache, and when I did sit down at the computer, it wasn’t to call up Grandma Rivers and the imperfect dream of her life, but to click onto peephall.com and watch another sort of novel unfold before my eyes, one in which the plot was out of control and the details were selected and shaped only by the anonymous subscriber with his anonymous mouse. I went straight to Samantha’s bedroom, but her bed was empty save for the jumbled topography of pillows and bedclothes, and I stared numbly at the shadows thickening round the walls, at the limp form of the gown tossed over a chair, and checked my watch. It was ten-thirty. Breakfast, I thought. I clicked on “Kitchen,” but that wasn’t her staring into the newspaper with a cup of coffee clenched in one hand and a Power Bar in the other, nor was that her bent at the waist and peering into the refrigerator as if for enlightenment. I went to the living room, but it was empty, a dully flickering static space caught in the baleful gaze of my screen. Had she gone out already? To an early class maybe?

But then I remembered she was taking only one class—“Intermediate Sketching,” paid for by the Web site operators, who were encouraging the Sexy Teen College Coeds actually to enroll so that all the voyeurs out there could live the fantasy of seeing them hitting the books in their thong bikinis and lacy push-up bras — and that the class met in the afternoon. She was getting paid too, incidentally — five hundred dollars a month, plus the rent-free accommodations at Peep Hall and a food allowance — and all for allowing the world to watch her live hot sexy young life through each scintillating minute of the over-inflated day, the orotund month and the full, round year. I thought of the girls who posed naked for the art classes back when I was an undergraduate (specifically, I thought of Nancy Beckers, short, black hair, balls of muscle in her calves and upper arms and a look in her eyes that made me want to strip to my socks and join her on the dais), and then I clicked on “Downstairs Bath,” and there she was.