T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

His arms were rigid, tense with muscle. He was staring down at his interlocked fingers, straining with the tension, as if he were doing an isometric exercise. “I was in the hospital,” he said.

The hospital. The syllables bit into me, made something race round the edge of my stomach. I did not want to hear it.

I got up to pour another brandy. “More milk?” I asked, the rigorous host, but he ignored me. He was going to tell me about the hospital. He raised his voice so I could hear him.

“They said it was a condition of giving me a clean slate. You know, they’d rehabilitate me. Eleven months. Locked up with the shit-flingers and droolers, the guys they’d shot up in the war. That was the hospital.”

I stood in the kitchen doorway, the brandy in my hand. He was accusing me. I’d started the war, oppressed the masses, wielded the dollar like an axe; I’d deserted him, told the FBI the truth, created the American Nazi Party, and erected the slums, stick by stick. What did he want from me — to say I was sorry? Sorry he was crazy, sorry he couldn’t go to law school, sorry Marx’s venom had eaten away the inside of his brain?

He was on his feet now. The empty glass flashed in his hand as he crossed the room. He handed it to me. We were inches apart. “Jack,” he said. I looked away.

“I’ve got to go now,” he whispered.

I stood at the door and watched him recede into the moonlight that spilled across the lawn like milk. He turned left on the macadam road, heading in the direction of his parents’ house.

Erica was behind me in her robe, squinting against the light in the hallway.

“Jack?” she said.

I barely heard her. Standing there in the doorway, watching the shadows close like a fist over the lawn, I was already packing.

(1981)

Hal had known Rob and Irene, Jill, Harvey, Tootle, and Pesky since elementary school, and they were all forty going on sixty.

Rob and Irene had been high-school sweethearts, and now, after quitting their tenured teaching jobs, they brokered babies for childless couples like themselves. They regularly flew to Calcutta, Bahrain, and Sarawak to bring back the crumpled brown-faced little sacks of bones they located for the infertile wives of dry cleaners and accountants. Though they wouldn’t admit it, they’d voted for Ronald Reagan.

Jill had a certain fragile beauty about her. She’d gone into a Carmelite nunnery after the obloquy of high school and the unrequited love she bore for Harvey, who at the time was hot for Tootle. She lived just up the street from Rob and Irene, in her late mother’s house, and she’d given up the nun’s life twelve years earlier to have carnal relations with a Safeway butcher named Eugene, who left her with a blind spot in one eye, a permanent limp, and triplets.

Harvey had been a high-school lacrosse star who quit college to join the Marines, acquiring a reputation for ferocity and selfless bravery during the three weeks he fought at Da Nang before taking thirty-seven separate bayonet wounds in his legs, chest, buttocks, and feet. He was bald and bloated, a brooding semi-invalid addicted to Quaalude, Tuinol, aspirin, cocaine, and Jack Daniel’s, and he lived in the basement of his parents’ house, eating little and saying less. He despised Hal, Rob and Irene, Jill, Tootle, and Pesky because they hadn’t taken thirty-seven bayonet wounds each and because they were communists and sellouts.

Tootle had been a cover girl; a macrobiot; the campaign manager for a presidential candidate from Putnam Valley, New York, who promised to push through legislation to animate all TV news features; and, finally, an environmentalist who spent all her waking hours writing broadsides for the Marshwort Preservationists’ League. She was having an off/on relationship with an Italian race-car driver named Enzo.

Pesky was assistant manager of Frampold’s LiquorMart, twice divorced and the father of a fourteen-year-old serial murderer whose twelve adult male victims all resembled Pesky in coloring, build, and style of dress.

And Hal? Hal was home from California. For his birthday.

Jill hosted the party. She had to. The triplets — Steve, Stevie, and Steven, now seven, seven, and seven, respectively — were hyperactive, antisocial, and twice as destructive as Hitler’s Panzer Corps. She hadn’t been able to get a baby-sitter for them since they learned to crawl. “All right,” Hal had said to her on the phone, “your house then. Seven o’clock. Radical. Really.” And then he hung up, thinking of the dingy cavern of her mother’s house, with its stained wallpaper, battered furniture, and howling drafts, and of the mortified silence that would fall over the gang when they swung by to pick up Jill on a Friday night and Mrs. Morlock — that big-bottomed, horse-toothed parody of Jill — would insist they come in for hot chocolate. But no matter. At least the place was big.

As it turned out, Hal was two hours late. He was from California, after all, and this was his party. He hadn’t seen any of these people in what — six years now? — and there was no way he was going to be cheated out of his grand entrance. At seven he pulled a pair of baggy parachute pants over his pink high-tops, stuck a gold marijuana-leaf stud through the hole in his left earlobe, wriggled into an Ozzie Osbourne Barf Tour T-shirt though it was twenty-six degrees out and driving down sleet, and settled into the Barcalounger in which his deceased dad had spent the last two-thirds of his life. He sipped Scotch, watched the TV blip rhythmically, and listened to his own sad old failing mom dodder on about the Jell-O mold she’d bought for Mrs. Herskowitz across the street. Then, when he was good and ready, he got up, slicked back his thinning, two-tone, forty-year-old hair that looked more and more like mattress stuffing every day, shrugged into his trenchcoat, and slammed out into the storm.

There were two inches of glare ice on the road. Hal thumped his mother’s stuttering Oldsmobile from tree to tree, went into a 180-degree spin, and schussed down Jill’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the denuded azalea bush, three Flexible Flyers, and a staved-in Renault on blocks. He licked his fingertips and smoothed down his sideburns on the doorstep, knocked perfunctorily, and entered, grinning, in all his exotic, fair-haired, California glory. Unfortunately, the effect was wasted — no one but Jill was there. Hunched in the corner of a gutted sofa, she smiled wanly from behind a mound of soggy Fritos and half a gallon of California dip. “Hi,” she said in a voice of dole, “they’re coming, they’re coming.” Then she winked her bad eye at him and limped across the room to stick her tongue in his mouth.

She was clinging to him, licking at his mustache and telling him about her bout with breast cancer, when the doorbell rang and Rob and Irene came hurtling into the room shrieking “My God, look at you!” They were late, they screamed, because the baby-sitter never showed for their daughter, Soukamathandravaki, whose frightened little face peered in out of the night behind them.

An instant later, Harvey swung furiously up the walk on his silver crutches, Tootle and Pesky staggered in together with reddened noses and dilated pupils, and Steve, Stevie, and Steven emerged from the back of the house on their minibikes to pop wheelies in the middle of the room. The party was on.

“So,” Harvey snarled, fencing Hal into the corner with the gleaming shafts of his crutches, “they tell me you’re doing pretty good out there, huh, bub?”

Pesky and Tootle were standing beside him, grinning till Hal thought their lips would dry out and stick to their teeth, and Pesky had his arm around Tootle’s shoulder. “Me?” Hal said, with a modest shrug. “Well, since you ask, my agent did say that—”