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

Chewing, sipping coffee, smoking, he studied his future bride there, as keen as any scholar intent on his one true subject. He made little speeches to her in his head, casual remarks he practiced over and over till he got them right — or thought he did anyway. Lingering over his coffee after cleaning the plate of crumbs with a dampened forefinger, he would wait till she came near with a glass or washcloth in hand, and he would blurt: “One thinks the weather will change, is that not true?” Or: “This is the most best sandwich of hamburger my mouth will ever receive.” And she? She would show her teeth in a little equine smile, or she would giggle, then sometimes sneeze, covering her nose and mouth with one hand as her late mother had no doubt taught her to do. All the while, Baldasare feasted on the sight of her. Sometimes he would sit there at the counter for two or three hours till Siagris the Greek would make some impatient remark and he would rise in confusion, his face suffused with blood, bowing and apologizing till he managed to find his way to the door.

It was during this time of close scrutiny that he began to detect certain small imperfections in his bride-to-be. Despite her education, for instance, she seemed to have inordinate difficulty in making change or reading off the menu from the chalkboard on the wall behind her. She’d begun to put on weight too, picking at bits of doughnut or fried potatoes the customers left on their plates. If she’d been substantial when Baldasare first laid eyes on her, she was much more than that now — stout, actually. As stout as Signora Cardino back home in Messina, who was said to drink olive oil instead of wine and breakfast on sugared cream and cake. And then there were her eyes — or rather, her right eye. It had a cast in it, and how he’d missed that on the day he was first smitten, he couldn’t say. But he had to look twice to notice the hairs on her chin — as stiff as a cat’s whiskers and just as translucent — and as far as he was concerned, the red blotches that had begun to appear on the perfect skin of her hands and throat might have been nothing more than odd splashes of marinara sauce, as if she’d gotten too close to the pot.

Another lover, less blinded by the light of certitude than Baldasare, might have found these blemishes a liability, but Baldasare treasured them. They were part of her, part of that quiddity that made her unique among women. He watched with satisfaction as her hips and buttocks swelled so that even at nineteen she had to walk with a waddle, looked on with a soaring heart as the blotches spread from her throat to her cheeks and brow and her right eye stared out of her head, across the room and out the window, surer each day that she was his. After all, who else would see in her what he saw? Who else could love her the way he did? Who but Baldasare Forestiere would come forward to declare himself? And he would declare himself soon — as soon as he finished digging.

—

Two years passed. He worked for other men and saved every cent of his wages, worse than any miser, and in his free time, he dug. When he completed a passage or a room or carved his way to the sky for light, he could already see the next passage and the next room beyond that. He had a vision, yes, and he had Ariadne to think of, but even so, he wasn’t the sort to sit around idle. He didn’t have the gift of letters, he didn’t play violin or mouth organ, and he rarely visited among his neighbors. The vaudeville theater was a long way off, too far to walk, and he went there only once, with Lucca Albanese, a vineyard worker with whom he’d struck up a friendship. There were comedians and jugglers and pretty women all dancing like birds in flight, but all the while he was regretting the two cents the streetcar had cost him and the fifteen-cent admission, and he never went back. No, he stayed home with his shovel and his vision, and many days he didn’t know morning from night.

Saturdays, though, he kept sacred. Saturday was the day he walked the three and a half miles to Siagris’ Drugstore, through winter rains and summer heat that reached a hundred and sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. He prided himself on his constancy, and he was pleased to think that Ariadne looked forward to his weekly visits as much as he did. His place at the end of the counter was always vacant, as if reserved for him, and he relished the little smiles with which she greeted him and the sweet flow of familiar phrases that dropped so easily from her supple American lips: “So how’ve you been?” “Nice day.” “Think it’s coming on to rain?”

As time went on, they became increasingly intimate. She told him of her uncle’s back pain, the illness of her cat, the ascension of her oldest brother to assistant floor supervisor at the Chicago Iron Works, and he told her of his ranch and of the elegance and spaciousness of his living quarters. “Twelve room,” he said. “Twelve room, and all to myself.” And then came the day when he asked her, in his runaway English, if she would come with him to the ranch for a picnic. “But not just the picnic,” he said, “but also the scene, how do you say, the scene of the place, and my, my house, because I want — I need — you see, I…”

She was leaning over the counter, splotchy and huge. Her weight had stabilized in the past year — she’d reached her full growth, finally, at the age of twenty-one — and she floated above her feet like one of the airships the Germans so prized. “Yes,” she said, and she giggled and sneezed, a big mottled hand pressed to her mouth, “I’d love to.”

The following Sunday he came for her, lightly ascending the sun-bleached steps to the walkup above the drugstore where she lived with uncle and aunt and their five children. It was a hot September morning, all of Fresno and the broad dusty valley beyond held in the grip of something stupendous, a blast of air so sere and scorching you would have thought the whole world was a pizza oven with the door open wide. Siagris the Greek answered his knock. He was in his shirtsleeves and the sweat had made a washcloth of his garments, the white field of his shirt stuck like a postage stamp to the bulge of his belly. He didn’t smile but he didn’t look displeased either, and Baldasare understood the look: Siagris didn’t like him, not one bit, and in other circumstances might have gone out of his way to squash him like a bug, but then he had a niece who took up space and ate like six nieces, and Baldasare could just maybe deliver him from that. “Come in,” he said, and there was Baldasare, the cave-dweller, in a room in a house two stories above the ground.

Up here, inside, it was even hotter. The Siagris children lay about like swatted flies, and Mrs. Siagris, her hair like some wild beast clawing at her scalp, poked her head around the corner from the kitchen. It was too hot to smile, so she grimaced instead and pulled her head back out of sight. And then, in the midst of this suffocating scene, the voice of a ventriloquist cried out, “He’s here,” and Ariadne appeared in the hallway.

She was all in white, with a hat the size of a tabletop perched atop the mighty pile of her hair. He was melting already, from the heat, but when she focused her wild eye on him and turned up her lips in the shyest of smiles, he melted a little more.

Outside, in the street, she gave him her arm, which was something of a problem because she was so much taller than he was, and he had to reach up awkwardly to take it. He was wearing his best suit of clothes, washed just the evening before, and the unfamiliar jacket clung to him like dead skin while the new celluloid collar gouged at his neck and the tie threatened to throttle him. They managed to walk the better part of a block before she put her feet together and came to a halt. “Where’s your carriage?” she asked.