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

Greg looked surprised and maybe a bit shocked too — she might as well have asked him if he was a Zulu. He gave me a quick glance, then shifted his gaze to Moira. “My last name’s Sorenson,” he said, struggling to keep his voice under control, and he took off his cap to show her the blond highlights in his hair. He replaced the cap indignantly and held out his arms. “I’m a surfer,” he said, “every chance I get. This is what’s known as a tan. ”

I watched the sun touch her hair as she straightened up with the tray and struggled with her smile. She must bleach her hair, I was thinking, because nobody under seventy has hair that white — and it was amazing hair, white right on through to the scalp, sheep-white, bone-white, paper-white — when she squared her shoulders and looked down at Greg as if he were some panting animal she’d discovered in a cage at the zoo. “Well, that’s nice,” she said finally. “Very nice. It’s a nice sport. Will you be working here long? For us, I mean?”

“We’ll be done this time tomorrow, Moira,” I said, cutting in before Greg could say something I might wind up regretting. “We’ve just got to rake out the lawn — the dirt, that is — for the blacktop guy, and take out the rest of the pittosporum under the tea tree. Walt Tremaine and his people are going to need two more days.”

Moira wavered on the cusp of this news, the gauzy beekeeper’s outfit inflating with a sudden breath of wind. She held the tray of milk and cookies rigidly before her, and I noticed her hands for the first time, a young woman’s hands, sleek and unlined, the fingernails heavily enameled in cake-frosting white. “Vincent,” she said after a moment, raising her voice to be heard over the dopplering whine of the shredder out on the street, “could I have a word with you in private?” She moved off then without waiting for an answer, and I was left to push myself up and tag after her, like the hired help I was.

We’d marched forty feet across the ravaged yard before she turned to me. “This Sorenson,” she said. “Your associate?”

“Yeah?”

“I presume he’s just casual labor?”

I nodded.

She glanced up toward the house and I followed her line of sight to one of the second-story windows. Caitlin was there, in her funereal black, looking down on the wreckage of the yard with a fixed stare. “I don’t want to put you out, Vincent,” Moira was saying, and she was still staring up at the image of her sister, “but couldn’t you find someone a little less sallow for tomorrow?”

There wouldn’t be any gardening going on around here for some time to come, and I didn’t really have to kowtow to this woman anymore — or humor her either — but I went along with her just the same. Call it a reflex. “Sure,” I said, and I had to keep myself from tipping my hat. “No problem.”

—

A week later the yard was an empty parking lot surrounded by a ten-foot-high clapboard fence (whitewashed, of course). From inside you couldn’t see a trace of green anywhere — or yellow, red, pink or tangerine, for that matter. I wondered how they felt, Moira and her sweet sad sister, when they stepped outside on their perfectly contoured blacktop plateau and looked up into the airy blue reaches of the sky with that persistent golden sun hanging in the middle of it. Disappointed? Frustrated? Sorry God hadn’t made us all as color-blind as dogs? Maybe they ought to just go ahead and dome the place — sure, just like a baseball stadium, and they could paint the underside of the thing Arctic white. Or avoid daylight altogether. A good starlit night wouldn’t interfere with the scheme at all.

Do I sound bitter? I was bitter — and disgusted with myself for being party to the whole fiasco. It was so negative, so final, so life-quenching and drab. Moira was sick, and her heart and mind must have been as black as her sister’s dresses, but Caitlin — I couldn’t believe she was that far gone. Not after the day we’d spent drinking beer and reminiscing or the way she smiled at me and spoke my name, my real name, and not some bughouse invention (and who was Vincent, I’d like to know?). No, there was feeling there, I was sure of it, and sensitivity and sweetness too. And need. A whole lot of need. That was why I found myself slowing outside their fence as I came and went from one job or another, hoping to catch a glimpse of Caitlin backing her Mercedes out into the street or collecting the mail, but all I ever saw was the blank white field of the fence.

Then, early one evening as I lay soaking in the tub, trying to scrub the deep verdigris stains of Miracle-Gro off my hands and forearms, the phone rang. I got to it, dripping, on the fifth ring. Caitlin was on the other end. “Larry,” she said, “hi. Listen,” she said, her voice soft and breathy, “I kind of miss you, I mean, not seeing you around. I’d like to offer you a beer sometime—”

“Be right over,” I said.

It was high summer and still light out when I got there, the streets bathed in a soft, milky luminescence, swallowtails leaping in the air, bougainvillea, hibiscus, Euryops and oleander blazing against the fall of night. I’d automatically thrown on a pair of black jeans and an unadorned white T-shirt, but as I was going out the door I reached in the coat closet and pulled out a kelly-green sport coat I’d bought for St. Patrick’s Day one year, the sort of thing you regret having spent good money on the minute the last beer is drained and the fiddler stops fiddling. But by my lights, what Caitlin needed was a little color in her life, and I was the man to give it to her. I stopped by the florist’s on my way and got her a dozen long-stemmed roses, and I didn’t look twice at the white ones. No, the roses I picked were as deep and true as everything worth living for, red roses, bright red roses, roses that flowed up out of their verdant stems like blood from an open artery.

I punched in the code at the gate and wheeled my pickup into the vast parking lot that was their yard and parked beside the front steps (the color of my truck, incidentally, is white, albeit a beat-up, battered and very dirty shade of it). Anyway, I climbed out of my white truck in my black jeans, white shirt and kelly-green jacket and moved across the blacktop and up the white steps with the blood-red roses clutched under one arm.

Caitlin answered the door. “Larry,” she murmured, letting her eyes stray from my face to the jacket and back again, “I’m glad you could come. Did you eat yet?”

I had. A slime burger, death fries and a side dish of fermented slaw at the local greasy spoon. I could have lied, trying to hold the picture of her whipping up a mud pie or blackened sole with mashed potatoes or black beans, but food wasn’t what I’d come for. “Yeah,” I said, “on my way home from work. Why? You want to go out?”

We were in the front hall now, in a black-and-white world, no shade of gray even, the checkered tiles gleaming, ebony chairs, a lacquered Japanese cabinet. She gave me her black-lipped smile. “Me?” she said. “Uh-uh. No. I don’t want to go out.” A pause. “I want to go to bed.”

In bed, after I discovered she was black and white without her clothes on too, we sipped stout and porter and contemplated the scintillating roses, set in a white vase against a white wall like a trompe l’oeil. And we talked. Talked about love and need and loss, talked about the world and its tastes and colors, and talked round and round the one subject that stood between us. We’d become very close for the second time and were lying in each other’s arms, all the black lipstick kissed off her, when I came back to the question I’d posed in the kitchen the last time we’d talked. “So,” I said. “Okay. It’s a long story, but the night’s long too, and I tell you, I don’t feel the least bit sleepy. Come on, the black and white. Tell me.”