T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

She met me at the door in a silk kimono that featured a plunging neckline and a pair of dragons with intertwined tails. Her hair was pinned up as if she’d just stepped out of the bath and she smelled of Noxzema and pHisoHex. She pecked my cheek, took the bottle of Vouvray I held out in offering, and led me into the front room. “Chagas’ disease,” she said, grinning wide to show off her perfect, outsized teeth.

“Chagas’ disease?” I echoed, not quite knowing what to do with myself. The room was as spare as a monk’s cell. Two chairs, a loveseat, and a coffee table, in glass, chrome, and hard black plastic. No plants (“God knows what sort of insects might live on them — and the dirt , the dirt has got to be crawling with bacteria, not to mention spiders and worms and things”) and no rug (“A breeding ground for fleas and ticks and chiggers”).

Still grinning, she steered me to the hard black plastic loveseat and sat down beside me, the Vouvray cradled in her lap. “South America,” she whispered, her eyes leaping with excitement. “In the jungle. These bugs — assassin bugs, they’re called — isn’t that wild? These bugs bite you and then, after they’ve sucked on you a while, they go potty next to the wound. When you scratch, it gets into your bloodstream, and anywhere from one to twenty years later you get a disease that’s like a cross between malaria and AIDS.”

“And then you die,” I said.

“And then you die.”

Her voice had turned somber. She wasn’t grinning any longer. What could I say? I patted her hand and flashed a smile. “Yum,” I said, mugging for her.

“What’s for dinner?”

She served a cold cream-of-tofu-carrot soup and little lentil-paste sandwiches for an appetizer and a garlic soufflé with biologically controlled vegetables for the entree. Then it was snifters of cognac, the big-screen TV, and a movie called The Boy in the Bubble , about a kid raised in a totally antiseptic environment because he was born without an immune system. No one could touch him. Even the slightest sneeze would have killed him. Breda sniffled through the first half-hour, then pressed my hand and sobbed openly as the boy finally crawled out of the bubble, caught about thirty-seven different diseases, and died before the commercial break. “I’ve seen this movie six times now,” she said, fighting to control her voice, “and it gets to me every time. What a life,” she said, waving her snifter at the screen, “what a perfect life. Don’t you envy him?”

I didn’t envy him. I envied the jade pendant that dangled between her breasts and I told her so.

She might have giggled or gasped or lowered her eyes, but she didn’t. She gave me a long slow look, as if she were deciding something, and then she allowed herself to blush, the color suffusing her throat in a delicious mottle of pink and white. “Give me a minute,” she said mysteriously, and disappeared into the bathroom.

I was electrified. This was it. Finally. After all the avowals, the pressed hands, the little jokes and routines, after all the miles driven, meals consumed, muse-urns paced, and movies watched, we were finally, naturally, gracefully going to come together in the ultimate act of intimacy and love.

I felt hot. There were beads of sweat on my forehead. I didn’t know whether to stand or sit. And then the lights dimmed, and there she was at the rheostat.

She was still in her kimono, but her hair was pinned up more severely, wound in a tight coil to the crown of her head, as if she’d girded herself for battle. And she held something in her hand — a slim package, wrapped in plastic. It rustled as she crossed the room.

“When you’re in love, you make love,” she said, easing down beside me on the rocklike settee, “—it’s only natural.” She handed me the package. “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,” she said, her voice throaty and raw, “just because I’m careful and modest and because there’s so much, well, filth in the world, but I have my passionate side too. I do. And I love you, I think.”

“Yes,” I said, groping for her, the package all but forgotten.

We kissed. I rubbed the back of her neck, felt something strange, an odd sag and ripple, as if her skin had suddenly turned to Saran Wrap, and then she had her hand on my chest. “Wait,” she breathed, “the, the thing.”

I sat up. “Thing?”

The light was dim but I could see the blush invade her face now. She was sweet. Oh, she was sweet, my Little Em’ly, my Victorian princess. “It’s Swedish,” she said.

I looked down at the package in my lap. It was a clear, skin-like sheet of plastic, folded up in its transparent package like a heavy-duty garbage bag. I held it up to her huge, trembling eyes. A crazy idea darted in and out of my head. No, I thought.

“It’s the newest thing,” she said, the words coming in a rush, “the safest … I mean, nothing could possibly—”

My face was hot. “No,” I said.

“It’s a condom,” she said, tears starting up in her eyes, “my doctor got them for me they’re … they’re Swedish.” Her face wrinkled up and she began to cry. “It’s a condom,” she sobbed, crying so hard the kimono fell open and I could see the outline of the thing against the swell of her nipples, “a full-body condom.”

I was offended. I admit it. It wasn’t so much her obsession with germs and contagion, but that she didn’t trust me after all that time. I was clean. Quintessentially clean. I was a man of moderate habits and good health, I changed my underwear and socks daily — sometimes twice a day — and I worked in an office, with clean, crisp, unequivocal numbers, managing my late father’s chain of shoe stores (and he died cleanly himself, of a myocardial infarction, at seventy-five). “But Breda,” I said, reaching out to console her and brushing her soft, plastic-clad breast in the process, “don’t you trust me? Don’t you believe in me? Don’t you, don’t you love me?” I took her by the shoulders, lifted her head, forced her to look me in the eye. “I’m clean,” I said. “Trust me.”

She looked away. “Do it for me,” she said in her smallest voice, “if you really love me.”

In the end, I did it. I looked at her, crying, crying for me, and I looked at the thin sheet of plastic clinging to her, and I did it. She helped me into the thing, poked two holes for my nostrils, zipped the plastic zipper up the back, and pulled it tight over my head. It fit like a wetsuit. And the whole thing — the stroking and the tenderness and the gentle yielding — was everything I’d hoped it would be.

Almost.

She called me from work the next day. I was playing with sales figures and thinking of her. “Hello,” I said, practically cooing into the receiver.

“You’ve got to hear this.” Her voice was giddy with excitement.

“Hey,” I said, cutting her off in a passionate whisper, “last night was really special.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “yes, last night. It was. And I love you, I do …” She paused to draw in her breath. “But listen to this: I just got a piece from a man and his wife living among the Tuareg of Nigeria — these are the people who follow cattle around, picking up the dung for their cooking fires?”

I made a small noise of awareness.

“Well, they make their huts of dung too — isn’t that wild? And guess what — when times are hard, when the crops fail and the cattle can barely stand up, you know what they eat?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Dung?”

She let out a whoop. “Yes! Yes! Isn’t it too much? They eat dung!”

I’d been saving one for her, a disease a doctor friend had told me about.

“Onchocerciasis,” I said. “You know it?”