T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

He can feel the eyes of the big men on him. Across the room, at the bookcase, the Asian woman applies stickers to his first edition of Percival Lowell’s Mars and Its Canals , the astrolabe that once belonged to Captain Joshua

Slocum, the Starview scope his mother gave him when he turned twelve. “No, but, but—”

“Would that be fair, Mr. Laxner? Would that be equitable? Would it?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, turning instead to pose the question to her henchmen. “You think it’s fair, Mike? Fernando?”

“No gain without pain,” Mike says.

“Amen,” Fernando chimes in.

“Listen,” Julian blurts, and he’s upset now, as upset as he’s ever been, “I don’t care what you say, I’m the boss here and I say the stuff stays, just as it is. You — now put down that tripod.”

No one moves. Mike looks to Fernando, Fernando looks to Susan Certaine. After a moment, she lays a hand on Julian’s arm. “You’re not the boss here, Julian,” she says, the voice sunk low in her throat, “not anymore. If you have any doubts, just read the contract.” She attempts a smile, though smiles are clearly not her forte. “The question is, do you want to get organized or not? You’re paying me a thousand dollars a day, which breaks down to roughly two dollars a minute. You want to stand here and shoot the breeze at two dollars a minute, or do you want action?”

Julian hangs his head. She’s right, he knows it. “I’m sorry,” he says finally. “It’s just that I can’t … I mean I want to do something, anything—”

“You want to do something? You really want to help?”

Mike and Fernando are gone, already heading down the stairs with their burdens, and the Asian woman, her hands in constant motion, has turned to his science-fiction collection. He shrugs. “Yes, sure. What can I do?”

She glances at her watch, squares her shoulders, fixes him with her dark unreadable gaze. “You can take me to breakfast.”

Susan Certaine orders wheat toast, dry, and coffee, black. Though he’s starving, though he feels cored out from the back of his throat to the last constricted loop of his intestines, he follows suit. He’s always liked a big breakfast, eggs over easy, three strips of bacon, toast, waffles, coffee, orange juice, yogurt with fruit, and never more so than when he’s under stress or feels something coming on, but with Susan Certaine sitting stiffly across from him, her lips pursed in distaste, disapproval, ascetic renunciation of all and everything he stands for, he just doesn’t have the heart to order. Besides which, he’s on unfamiliar ground here. The corner coffee shop, where he and Marsha have breakfasted nearly every day for the past three years, wasn’t good enough for her. She had to drive halfway across the Valley to a place she knew, though for the life of him he can’t see a whole lot of difference between the two places — same menu, same coffee, even the waitresses look the same. But they’re not. And the fact of it throws him off balance.

“You know, I’ve been thinking, Mr. Laxner,” Susan Certaine says, speaking into the void left by the disappearance of the waitress, “you really should come over to us. For the rest of the week, I mean.”

Come over? Julian watches her, wondering what in god’s name she’s talking about, his stomach sinking over the thought of his Heinleins and Asimovs in the hands of strangers, let alone his texts and first editions and all his equipment — if they so much as scratch a lens, he’ll, he’ll … but his thoughts stop right there. Susan Certaine, locked in the grip of her black rigidity, is giving him a look he hasn’t seen before. The liminal smile, the coy arch of the eyebrows. She’s a young woman, younger than Marsha, far younger, and the apprehension hits him with a jolt. Here he is, sharing the most intimate meal of the day with a woman he barely knows, a young woman. He feels a wave of surrender wash over him.

“How can I persuade you?”

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, fumbling with his cup, “but I don’t think I’m following you. Persuade me of what?”

“The Co-Dependent Hostel. For the spouses. The spoilers. For men like you, Mr. Laxner, who give their wives material things instead of babies, instead of love.”

“But I resent that. Marsha’s physically incapable of bearing children — and I do love her, very much so.”

“Whatever.” She waves her hand in dismissal. “But don’t get the impression that it’s a men’s club or anything — you’d be surprised how many women are the enablers in these relationships. You’re going to need a place to stay until Sunday anyway.”

“You mean you want me to, to move out? Of my own house?”

She lays a hand on his. “Don’t you think it would be fairer to Marsha? She moved out, didn’t she? And by the way, Dr. Hauskopf tells me she passed a very restful night. Very restful.” A sigh. A glance out the window. “Well, what do you say?”

Julian pictures a big gray featureless building lost in a vacancy of smog, men in robes and pajamas staring dully at newspapers, the intercom crackling. “But my things—”

“Things are what we’re disburdening you of, Mr. Laxner. Things are crushing you, stealing your space, polluting your soul. That’s what you hired me for, remember?” She pushes her cup aside and leans forward, and the old look is back, truculent, disdainful. He finds himself gazing into the shimmering nullity of her eyes. “We’ll take care of all that,” she says, her voice pitched low again, subtle and entrancing, “right on down to your toothbrush, hemorrhoid cream and carpet slippers.” As if by legerdemain, a contract has appeared between the creamer and the twin plates of dry unadulterated toast. “Just sign here, Mr. Laxner, right at the bottom.”

Julian hesitates, patting down his pockets for his reading glasses. The original contract, the one that spelled out the responsibilities of Certaine Enterprises with respect to his things — and his and Marsha’s obligations to Certaine Enterprises — had run to 327 pages, a document he barely had time to skim before signing, and now this. Without his reading glasses he can barely make out the letterhead. “But how much is it, per day, I mean? Marsha’s, uh, treatment was four hundred a day, correct? This wouldn’t be anywhere in that ballpark, would it?”

“Think of it as a vacation, Mr. Laxner. You’re going away on a little trip, that’s all. And on Sunday, when you get home, you’ll have your space back. Permanently.” She looks into his eyes. “Can you put a price on that?”

The Susan Certaine Co-Dependent Hostel is located off a shady street in Sherman Oaks, on the grounds of a defunct private boys’ school, and it costs about twice as much as a good hotel in midtown Manhattan. Julian had protested — it was Marsha, Marsha was the problem, she was the one who needed treatment, not him — but Susan Certaine, over two slices of dry wheat toast, had worn him down. He’d given her control over his life, and she was exercising it. That’s what he’d paid for, that’s what he’d wanted. He asked only to go home and pack a small suitcase, an overnight bag, anything, but she refused him even that — and refused him the use of his own car on top of it. “Withdrawal has got to be total,” she says, easing up to the curb out front of the sprawling complex of earth-toned buildings even as a black-clad attendant hustles up to the car to pull open the door, “for both partners. I’m sure you’ll be very happy here, Mr. Laxner.”

“You’re not coming in?” he says, a flutter of panic seizing him as he shoots a look from her to the doorman and back again.

The black Mercedes hums beneath them. A bird folds its wings and dips across the lawn. “Oh, no, no, not at all. You’re on your own here, Mr. Laxner, I’m afraid — but in the best of hands, I assure you. No, my job is to go back to that black hole of a house and make it livable, to catalogue your things, organize. Organize , Mr. Laxner, that’s my middle name.”