T. Boyle: T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II

It was a Friday night in August, half-past seven, the sun hanging in the window like a piñata, and she’d just stepped out of the shower after a two-hour tuneup for Sunday’s triathlon, when the phone rang. Jason’s voice came over the wire, low and soft. “Hey, babe,” he said, breathing into the phone like a sex maniac (he always called her babe, and she loved it, precisely because she wasn’t a babe and never would be — it was their little way of mocking the troglodytes molded into the barstools beside him). “Listen, I was just wondering if you might want to join me down at Clubber’s for a while. Yeah, I know, you need your sleep and the big day’s the day after tomorrow and Zinny Bauer’s probably already asleep, but how about it. Come on. It’s my birthday.”

“Your birthday? I thought your birthday was in December?”

There was the ghost of a pause during which she could detect the usual wash of background noise, drunken voices crying out as if from the netherworld, the competing announcers of the six different games unfolding simultaneously on the twelve big-screen TVs, the insistent pulse of the jukebox thumping faintly beneath it all. “No,” he said, “my birthday’s today, August twenty-sixth — it is. I don’t know where you got the idea it was in December… but come on, babe, don’t you have to load up on carbohydrates?”

She did. She admitted it. “I was going to make pancakes and penne,” she said, “with a little cheese sauce and maybe a loaf of that brown-and-serve bread….”

“I’ll take you to the Pasta Bowl, all you can eat — and I swear I’ll have you back by eleven.” He lowered his voice. “And no sex, I know — I wouldn’t want to drain you or anything.”

—

She wasn’t soft because she ran forty-five miles a week, biked two hundred and fifty, and slashed through fifteen thousand yards of the crawl in the Baños del Mar pool. She was in the best shape of her life, and Sunday’s event was nothing, less than half the total distance of the big one — the Hawaii Ironman — in October. She wasn’t soft because she’d finished second in the women’s division last year in Hawaii and forty-fourth over all, beating out one thousand three hundred and fifty other contestants, twelve hundred of whom, give or take a few, were men. Like Jason. Only fitter. A whole lot fitter.

She swung by Clubber’s to pick him up — he wasn’t driving, not since his last D.U.I. anyway — and though parking was no problem, she had to endure the stench of cigarettes and the faint sour odor of yesterday’s vomit while he finished his cocktail and wrapped up his ongoing analysis of the Dodgers’ chances with an abstract point about a blister on somebody or other’s middle finger. The guy they called Little Drake, white-haired at thirty-six and with a face that reminded her of one of those naked drooping dogs, leaned out of his Hawaiian shirt and into the radius of Jason’s gesticulating hands as if he’d never heard such wisdom in his life. And Paula? She stood there at the bar in her shorts and Lycra halter top, sucking an Evian through a straw while the sports fans furtively admired her pecs and lats and the hard hammered musculature of her legs, for all the world a babe. She didn’t mind. In fact, it made her feel luminous and alive, not to mention vastly superior to all those pale lumps of flesh sprouting out of the corners like toadstools and the sagging abrasive girlfriends who hung on their arms and tried to feign interest in whatever sport happened to be on the tube.

But somebody was talking to her, Little Drake, it was Little Drake, leaning across Jason and addressing her as if she were one of them. “So Paula,” he was saying. “Paula?”

She swiveled her head toward him, hungry now, impatient. She didn’t want to hang around the bar and schmooze about Tommy Lasorda and O.J. and Proposition 187 and how Phil Aguirre had broken both legs and his collarbone in the surf at Rincon; she wanted to go to the Pasta Bowl and carbo-load. “Yes?” she said, trying to be civil, for Jason’s sake.

“You going to put them to shame on Sunday, or what?”

Jason was snubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, collecting his money from the bar. They were on their way out the door — in ten minutes she’d be forking up fettucine or angel hair with black olives and sun-dried tomatoes while Jason regaled her with a satiric portrait of his day and all the crazies who’d passed through his shop. The little man with the white hair didn’t require a dissertation, and besides, he couldn’t begin to appreciate the difference between what she was doing and the ritualistic farce of the tobacco-spitting, crotch-grabbing “athletes” all tricked out in their pretty unblemished uniforms up on the screen over his head, so she just smiled, like a babe, and said, “Yeah.”

Truly, the race was nothing, just a warm-up, and it would have been less than nothing but for the puzzling fact that Zinny Bauer was competing. Zinny was a professional, from Hamburg, and she was the one who’d cranked past Paula like some sort of machine in the final stretch of the Ironman last year. What Paula couldn’t fathom was why Zinny was bothering with this small-time event when there were so many other plums out there. On the way out of Clubber’s, she mentioned it to Jason. “Not that I’m worried,” she said, “just mystified.”

It was a fine, soft, glowing night, the air rich with the smell of the surf, the sun squeezing the last light out of the sky as it sank toward Hawaii. Jason was wearing his faded-to-pink 49ers jersey and a pair of shorts so big they made his legs look like sticks. He gave her one of his hooded looks, then got distracted and tapped at his watch twice before lifting it to his ear and frowning. “Damn thing stopped,” he said. It wasn’t until they were sliding into the car that he came back to the subject of Zinny Bauer. “It’s simple, babe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and letting his face go slack. “She’s here to psych you out.”

—

He liked to watch her eat. She wasn’t shy about it — not like the other girls he’d dated, the ones on a perpetual diet who made you feel like a two-headed hog every time you sat down to a meal, whether it was a Big Mac or the Mexican Plate at La Fondita. No “salad with dressing on the side” for Paula, no butterless bread or child’s portions. She attacked her food like a lumberjack, and you’d better keep your hands and fingers clear. Tonight she started with potato gnocchi in a white sauce puddled with butter, and she ate half a loaf of crusty Italian bread with it, sopping up the leftover sauce till the plate gleamed. Next it was the fettucine with Alfredo sauce, and on her third trip to the pasta bar she heaped her plate with mostaccioli marinara and chunks of hot sausage — and more bread, always more bread.

He ordered a beer, lit a cigarette without thinking, and shoveled up some spaghetti carbonara, thick on the fork and sloppy with sauce. The next thing he knew, he was staring up into the hot green gaze of the waitperson, a pencil-necked little fag he could have snapped in two like a breadstick if this weren’t California and everything so copacetic and laid back. It was times like this when he wished he lived in Cleveland, even though he’d never been there, but he knew what was coming and he figured people in Cleveland wouldn’t put up with this sort of crap.

“You’ll have to put that out,” the little fag said.

“Sure, man,” Jason said, gesturing broadly so that the smoke fanned out around him like the remains of a pissed-over fire. “Just as soon as I”—puff, puff—“take another drag and”—puff, puff—“find me an ashtray somewhere… you wouldn’t happen”—puff, puff—“to have an ashtray, would you?”