T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

He was momentarily flustered when the waitress appeared on his left to ask if he wanted another drink, but he let the alcohol sing in his veins and said, “Why not? — ¿ Porqué no?” —and the waitress giggled and went off with her increasingly admirable rump moving at the center of that long white gown. When he stole another glance at the woman in the corner, she was still looking his way. He smiled. She smiled back. He turned away again and bided his time, but when his drink came he tossed some money on the table, rose massively from the chair and tottered across the room.

“Hi,” he said, looming over the chewing woman, the drink rigid in his hand, his teeth clenched around a defrosted smile. “I mean, Buenos tardes. Or noches. “

He watched her face for a reaction, but she just stared at him.

“Uh, ¿ Cómo está Usted? Or tú. ¿ Cómo estás tú?”

“Sit down, why don’t you,” she said in a voice that was as American as Hillary Clinton’s. “Take a load off.”

Suddenly he felt dizzy. His drink had somehow concentrated itself till it was as dense as a meteorite. He pulled out a chair and sat heavily. “I thought … I thought you were—?”

“I’m Italian,” she said. “From Buffalo originally. All four of my grandparents came from Tuscany. That’s where I get my exotic Latin looks.” She let out a short bark of a laugh, forked up a slab of fish and began chewing vigorously, all the while studying him out of eyes that were like two scalpels.

He finished his drink in a gulp and looked over his shoulder for the waitress. “You want another one?” he asked, though he saw she hadn’t half-finished her first.

Still chewing, she smiled up at him. “Sure.”

When the transaction was complete and the waitress had presented them with two fresh drinks, he thought to ask her name, but the silence had gone on too long and when they both began to speak at the same time, he deferred to her. “So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

“Biotech. I work for a company in the East Bay — Oakland, that is.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Really? Is that like making potatoes that walk around the kitchen and peel themselves, that sort of thing? Cloning sheep? Two-headed dogs?”

Lester laughed. He was feeling good. Better than good. “Not exactly.”

“My name’s Gina,” she said, reaching out her hand, “but you might know me as ‘The Cheetah.’ Gina ‘The Cheetah’ Caramella?”

He took her hand, which was dry and small and nearly lost in his own. He was drunk, gloriously drunk, and so far he hadn’t been ripped off by the Federales or assailed by the screaming shits or leached dry by malarial mosquitoes and vampire bats or any of the other myriad horrors he’d been warned against, and that made him feel pretty near invulnerable. “What do you mean — you’re an actress?”

She gave a little laugh. “I wish.” Ducking her head, she chased the remnants of the fish round the plate with her fork and the plane of her left index finger. “No,” she said, “I’m a boxer.”

The alcohol percolated through him. He wanted to laugh, but he fought down the urge. “A boxer? You don’t mean like boxing , do you? Fisticuffs? Pugilism?”

“Twenty-three, two, and one,” she said. She took a sip of her drink. Her eyes were bright. “What I’m doing right now is agonizing over my defeat two weeks ago at the Shrine by one of the queen bitches in the game, DeeDee DeCarlo, and my manager thought it would be nice for me to just get away for a bit, you know what I mean?”

He was electrified. He’d never met a female boxer before — hadn’t even known there was such a thing. Mud-wrestling he could see — in fact, since his wife died he’d become a big fan, Tuesday nights and sometimes on Fridays — but boxing? That wasn’t a woman’s sport. It was crazy. Drunkenly, he scrutinized her face, and it was a good face, a pretty face, but for the bridge of her nose, a telltale depression there, just the faintest misalignment — and sure, sure, how had he missed it? “But doesn’t it hurt? … I mean, when you get punched in the … body punches, I mean?”

“In the tit?”

He just nodded.

“Sure it hurts, what do you think? But I wear a padded bra, wrap ‘em up, pull ‘em flat across the rib cage so my opponent won’t have a clear target, but really, it’s the abdominal blows that take it out of you,” and she was demonstrating with her hands now, the naked slope of her belly and the slit of her navel, abs of steel, but nothing like those freakish female bodybuilders they threw at you on ESPN, nice abs, nice navel, nice, nice, nice.

“You doing anything for dinner tonight?” he heard himself say.

She looked down at the denuded plate before her, nothing left but lettuce, don’t eat the lettuce, never eat the lettuce, not in Mexico. She shrugged. “I guess I could … I guess in a couple hours.”

He lifted the slab of his arm and consulted his watch with a frown of concentration. “Nine o’clock?”

She shrugged again. “Sure.”

“By the way,” he said. “I’m Lester.”

April had been dead two years now. She’d been struck and killed by a car a block from their apartment, and though the driver was a teenage kid frozen behind the wheel of his father’s Suburban, it wasn’t entirely his fault. For one thing, April had stepped out in front of him, twenty feet from the crosswalk, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, she was blindfolded at the time. Blindfolded and feeling her way with one of those flexible fiberglass sticks the blind use to register the world at their feet. It was for a psychology course she was taking at San Francisco State—“Strategies of the Physically Challenged.” The professor had asked for two volunteers to remain blindfolded for an entire week, even at night, even in bed, no cheating, and April had been the first to raise her hand. She and Lester had been married for two years at the time — his first, her second — and now she was two years dead.

Lester had always been a drinker — and, for that matter, an abuser of recreational drugs — but after April’s death he seemed to enjoy drinking less and need it more, as if he were lowering himself hand over hand down a long tapering rope that led to some dark place reeking of vomit and vodka fumes. He knew it, and he fought it. Still, when he got back to his room, sailing on the high of his chance meeting with Gina — Gina the Cheetah — he couldn’t help digging out the bottle of Herradura he’d bought in the duty-free and taking a good long cleansing hit.

There was no TV in the room, but the air conditioner worked just fine and he stood in front of it awhile before he stripped off his sodden shirt, applied a fresh towel to his face and the swell of his gut and stepped into the shower. The water was tepid, but it did him good. He shaved, brushed his teeth, and repositioned himself in front of the air conditioner. When he saw the bottle standing there on the night table, he thought he’d have just one more hit — just one — because he didn’t want to be utterly wasted when he took Gina the Cheetah out for dinner. But then he looked at his watch and saw that it was only seven-twenty, and figured what the hell, two drinks, three, he just wanted to have a good time. Too wired to sleep, he flung himself down on the bed like a big wet dripping fish and began poking through the yellowed paperback copy of Under the Volcanco he’d brought along because he couldn’t resist the symmetry of it. What else was he going to read in Mexico — Proust?

“’No se puede vivir sin amor,’” he read, ‘You can’t live without love,’ and he saw April stepping out into the street with her puny fiberglass stick and the black velvet sleep mask pulled tight over her eyes. But he didn’t like that picture, not at all, so he took another drink and thought of Gina. He hadn’t had a date in six months and he was ready. And who knew? — anything could happen. Especially on vacation. Especially down here. He tipped back the bottle, and then he flipped to the end of the book, where the Consul, cored and gutted and beyond all hope, tumbles dead down the ravine and they throw the bloated corpse of a dog down after him.