T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

On the moon, Julian wants to say. Saturn. On the bleak blasted ice plains of Pluto. He shrugs. “On the porch, I guess.”

The porch. Yes. The only problem is, the screened-in porch is already stacked to the eaves with sideboards, armoires, butter churns and bentwood rockers. The best they can do, after a fifteen-minute struggle, is to wedge the thing two-thirds of the way in the door. “Well,” says Julian, and he can feel his heart fluttering round his rib cage like some fist-sized insect, “I guess that’ll have to do.” The laugh he appends is curt with embarrassment. “Won’t have to worry about rain till November, anyway.”

The boy isn’t even breathing hard. He’s long-lipped and thin, strung together with wire, and he’s got one of those haircuts that make his head look as if it’s been put on backwards. For a long moment he leans over the hand truck, long fingers dangling, giving Julian a look that makes him feel like he’s from another planet. “Yeah, that’s right,” the boy finally murmurs, and he looks at his feet, then jerks himself up as if to drift back to the van, the freeway, the warehouse, before stopping cold again. He looks at Julian as if he’s forgotten something, and Julian digs into his pocket and gives the boy three dollars for his efforts.

The sun is there, a living presence, as the boy backs the van out of the driveway, and Julian knows he’s going to have to do something about the mahogany highboy — drape a sheet over it or maybe a plastic drop cloth — but somehow he can’t really seem to muster the energy. It’s getting too much for him — all these things, the addition that was filled before it was finished, the prefab storage sheds on the back lawn, the crammed closets, the unlivable living room — and the butt end of the highboy hanging from the porch door seems a tangible expression of all his deepest fears. Seeing it there, the harsh light glancing off its polished flanks, its clawed feet dangling in the air, he wants to cry out against the injustice of it all, his miserable lot, wants to dig out his binoculars and the thin peeling ground cloth he’s had since he was a boy in Iowa and go up to the mountains and let the meteor showers wash him clean, but he can’t. That ancient handcrafted butt end represents guilt, Marsha’s displeasure, a good and valuable thing left to deteriorate. He’s begun to move toward it in a halfhearted shuffle, knowing from experience that he can squeeze it in there somehow, when a horn sounds breathlessly behind him. He turns, condemned like Sisyphus, and watches as Marsha wheels into the drive, the Range Rover packed to the windows and a great dark slab of furniture lashed to the roof like some primitive landing craft. “Julian!” she calls. “Julian! Wait till you see what I found!”

“I’ve seen worse,” the woman says, and Julian can feel the short hairs on the back of his neck begin to stiffen — she’s seen worse, but she’s seen better, too. They’re standing in the living room — or rather on the narrow footpath between the canyons of furniture that obscure the walls, the fireplace, even the ceiling of what was once the living room — and Julian, afraid to look her in the eye, leans back against a curio cabinet crammed with painted porcelain dolls in native costume, nervously turning her card over in his hand. The card is certainly minimalistic— Susan Certaine , it reads in a thin black embossed script, Professional Organizer , and it gives a telephone number, nothing else — and the woman herself is impressive, brisk, imposing, even; but he’s just not sure. Something needs to be done, something radical — and, of course, Marsha, who left to cruise the flea markets an hour ago, will have to agree to it, at least in substance — but for all his misery and sense of oppression, for all the times he’s joked about burning the place down or holding the world’s biggest yard sale, Julian needs to be reassured, needs to be convinced.

“You’ve seen worse?” he prompts.

“Sure I have. Of course I have. What do you take me for, an amateur?”

Julian shrugs, turns up his palms, already on the defensive.

“Listen, in my business, Mr. Laxner, you tend to run across the hard cases, the ones anyone else would give up on — the Liberaces, the Warhols, the Nancy Reagans. You remember Imelda Marcos? That was me. I’m the one they called in to straighten out that mess. Twenty-seven hundred pairs of shoes alone, Mr. Laxner. Think about that.”

She pauses to let her eyes flicker over the room, the smallest coldest flame burning behind the twin slivers of her contact lenses. She’s a tall, pale, hovering presence, a woman stripped to the essentials, the hair torn back from her scalp and strangled in a bun, no cheeks, no lips, no makeup or jewelry, the dress black, the shoes black, the briefcase black as a dead black coal dug out of the bottom of the bag. “There’s trouble here,” she says finally, holding his eyes. “You’re dirty with things, Mr. Laxner, filthy, up to your ears in the muck.”

He is, he admits it, but he can’t help wincing at the harshness of the indictment.

She leans closer, the briefcase clamped like a breastplate across her chest, her breath hot in his face, soap, Sen-Sen, Listerine. “And do you know who I am, Mr. Laxner?” she asks, a hard combative friction in the back of her throat, a rasp, a growl.

Julian tries to sound casual, tries to work the hint of a smile into the corners of his mouth and ignore the fact that his personal space has suddenly shrunk to nothing. “Susan Certaine?”

“I am the purifying stream, Mr. Laxner, that’s who I am. The cleansing torrent, the baptismal font. I’ll make a new man of you.”

This is what she’s here for, he knows it, this is what he needs, discipline, compulsion, the iron promise, but still he can’t help edging away, a little dance of the feet, the condensing of a shoulder. “Well, yes, but”—giving her a sidelong glance, and still she’s there, right there, breathing out her Sen-Sen like a dental hygienist—“it’s a big job, it’s—”

“We inventory everything— everything —right down to the paper clips in your drawers and the lint in your pockets. My people are the best, real professionals. There’s no one like us in the business, believe me — and believe me when I tell you I’ll have this situation under control inside of a week, seven short days. I’ll guarantee it, in fact. All I need is your go-ahead.”

His go-ahead. A sudden vista opens up before him, unbroken beaches, limitless plains, lunar seas and Venusian deserts, the yawning black interstellar wastes. Would it be too much to ask to see the walls of his own house? Just once? Just for an hour? Yes, okay, sure, he wants to say, but the immensity of it stifles him. “I’ll have to ask my wife,” he hears himself saying. “I mean, consult with her, think it over.”

“Pah! That’s what they all say.” Her look is incendiary, bitter, the eyes curdling behind the film of the lenses, the lipless mouth clenched round something rotten. “Tell me something, Mr. Laxner, if you don’t mind my asking — you’re a stargazer, aren’t you?”

“Beg pardon?”

“The upstairs room, the one over the kitchen?” Her eyes are jumping, some mad electric impulse shooting through her like a power surge scorching the lines. “Come on now, come clean. All those charts and telescopes, the books — there must be a thousand of them.”

Now it’s Julian’s turn, the ball in his court, the ground solid under his feet. “I’m an astronomer, if you want to know.”

She says nothing, just watches him out of those burning messianic eyes, waiting.