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

Her eyes were fixed on his. She didn’t say anything, but a low throaty rumble escaped her throat.

Waiting for the Rains

The Reverend Singh sat there on the veranda, waiting for the rains. He’d set his notebook aside, and now he leaned back in the wicker chair and pulled meditatively at his pipe. The children were at play in the courtyard, an array of flashing limbs and animated faces attended by their high, bright catcalls and shouts. The heat had loosened its grip ever so perceptibly, and they were all of them better for it. Except Kamala. She was indifferent. The chill of winter, the damp of the rains, the full merciless sway of the sun — it was all the same to her. His eyes came to rest on her where she lay across the courtyard in a stripe of sunlight, curled in the dirt with her knees drawn up beneath her and her chin resting atop the cradle of her crossed wrists. He watched her for a long while as she lay motionless there, no more aware of what she was than a dog or an ass, and he felt defeated, defeated and depressed. But then one of the children called out in a voice fluid with joy, a moment of triumph in a game among them, and the Reverend couldn’t help but shift his eyes and look.

(2002)

I was having trouble getting to sleep. Nothing serious, just the usual tossing and turning, the pillow converted to stone, every whisper of the night amplified to a shriek. I heard the refrigerator click on in the kitchen, the soft respiration of the dust-clogged motor that kept half a six-pack, last week’s takeout Chinese and the crusted jar of capers at a safe and comfortable temperature, and then I heard it click off. Every seven and a half minutes — I timed it by the glowing green face of the deep-sea diver’s watch my ex-wife gave me for Christmas last year — the neighbors’ dog let out a single startled yelp, and twenty seconds later I heard the car of some drunk or shift worker laboring up the hill with an intermittent wheeze and blast of exhaust (and couldn’t anybody in this neighborhood afford a new car — or at least a trip to the muffler shop?). It was three o’clock in the morning. Then it was four. I tried juggling invisible balls, repeating the names of my elementary school teachers, Mrs. Gold, Mrs. Cochrane, Miss Mandia, Miss Slivovitz, summoned their faces, the faces of as many of my classmates as I could remember, the faces of everybody in the neighborhood where I grew up, of everybody in New York, California, China, but it didn’t do any good. I fell asleep ten minutes before the alarm hammered me back to consciousness.

By the time I got both legs into a pair of jeans and both arms through the armholes of my favorite Hawaiian shirt, I was running late for work. I didn’t bother with gelling my hair or even looking at it, just grabbed a stocking cap and pulled it down to my eyebrows. Some sort of integument seemed to have been interposed between me and the outside world, some thick dullish skin that made every movement an ordeal, as if I were swimming in a medium ten times denser than water — and how the scalding twelve-ounce container of Starbuck’s triple latte wound up clenched between my legs as I gripped the steering wheel of the car that didn’t even feel like my own car — that felt borrowed or stolen — I’ll never know.

All this by way of saying I was late getting to the studio. Fifteen minutes late, to be exact. The first face I saw, right there, stationed at the battered back door with the call letters KFUN pasted at eye level in strips of peeling black electrical tape, seemed to belong to Cuttler Ames, the program director. Seemed to, that is, because the studio was filled to the ceiling with this new element I had to fight my way through, at least until the caffeine began to take hold and the integument fell away like so much sloughed skin. Cuttler made his lemon-sucking face. “Don’t tell me you overslept,” he said. “Not today of all days. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me your car threw a rod, tell me you got a speeding ticket, tell me your house burned down.”

Cuttler was a Brit. He wore his hair long and his face baggy. His voice was like Karo syrup poured through an echo box. He’d limped through the noon-hour “Blast from the Past” show for six months before he was elevated to program director over the backs of a whole troop of more deserving men (and women). I didn’t like him. Nobody liked him. “My house burned down,” I said.

“Why don’t you pull your head up out of your ass, will you? For once? Would that be too much to ask?” He turned to wheel away, resplendent in his black leather bell bottoms with the silver medallions sewed into the seams, then stopped to add, “Anthony’s already in there, going it alone, which makes me wonder what we’re paying you for, but let’s not develop a sense of urgency here or anything — let’s just linger in the corridor and make small talk, shall we?” A pause. The man was in a time warp. The leather pants, the wide-collared shirt, the pointy-toed boots: it was 1978 and Pink Floyd was ascendant. His eyes flamed briefly. “How did you sleep?”

Anthony was Tony, my morning-show partner. Sometimes, depending on his mood, Cuttler called him “Tony” like everybody else, except that he pronounced it “Tunny.” The question of how I’d slept was of vital import on this particular morning, because I’d been in training for the past week under the direction of Dr. Laurie Pepper of the Sleep Institute, who was getting some high-profile publicity for her efforts, not to mention a reduced rate on her thirty-second spots. “You need to build up your sleep account,” she told me, perched on the edge of the couch in my living room, and she prescribed long hot baths and sipping tepid milk before bed. “White noise helps,” she said. “One of my clients, a guitarist in an A-list band whose name I can’t reveal because of confidentiality issues, and I hope you’ll understand, used to make a tape loop of the toilet flushing and play it back all night.” She was in her mid-thirties and she had a pair of dramatic legs she showed off beneath short skirts and Morning Mist stockings, and in case anybody failed to take note she wore a gold anklet that spelled out Somnus in linked letters. “Roman god of sleep,” she said when she saw where my eyes had wandered. She had a notepad in her lap. She consulted it and uncrossed her legs. “Sex helps,” she said, coming back to the point she was pursuing. I told her I wasn’t seeing anybody just then. She shrugged, an elegant little shift of the shoulders. “Masturbation, then.”

There was a coffeepot and a tray of two-days’-stale doughnuts set up on a table against the wall just behind Cuttler, the remnants of a promotion for the local Krazy Kreme franchise. I went for them like a zombie, pausing only to reference his question. “Like shit,” I said.

“Oh, smashing. Super. Our champion, our hero. I suppose you’ll be drooling on the table ten minutes into the marathon.”

I wanted a cigarette, though it was an urge I had to fight. Since Cuttler’s accession we’d become a strictly tobacco-free workplace and I had to hide my Larks out of sight and blow smoke into a screw-top bottle when Tony and I were on the air. I could feel the caffeine working its way up the steep grades and inclines of my circulatory system like a train of linked locomotives, chugging away. In a burst of exhilaration I actually drew the pack from my pocket and shook out a cigarette, just to watch Cuttler’s face go into isolation. I made as if to stick the cigarette between my lips, but then thought better of it and tucked it behind my ear. “No way,” I said. “You want me to go twelve days, I’ll go twelve days. Fourteen, fifteen, whatever you want. Jesus, I don’t sleep anyway.” And then I was in the booth with Tony, ad-libbing, doing routines, cueing up records and going to commercials I’d heard so many times I could have reprised them in my sleep — if I ever slept, that is.