T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“You mean to tell me you actually understand all that lip-pulling and finger-waving?” I was beginning to feel a nameless sense of outrage.

“Oh sartinly, mah good man. Dat ASL.”

“What?”

“ASL is what we was talkin. A-merican Sign Language. Developed for de deef n dumb. Yo sees, Mastuh Konrad is sumfin ob a genius round here. He can commoonicate de mos esoteric i-deas in bof ASL and Yerkish, re-spond to and translate English, French, German and Chinese. Fack, it was Miz Good was tellin me dat Konrad is workin right now on a Yerkish translation ob Darwin’s De-scent o Man. He is mainly into anthro-pology, yo knows, but he has cultivated a in-teress in udder fields too. Dis lass fall he done undertook a Yerkish translation ob Chomsky’s Language and Mind and Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse. And dat’s some pretty heavy shit, Jackson.”

I was hot with outrage, “Stuff,” I said. “Stuff and nonsense.”

“No sense in feelin personally treatened by Mastuh Konrad’s chievements, mah good fellow — yo’s got to ree-lize dat he is a genius.”

A word came to me: “Bullhonk,” I said. And turned to leave.

The janitor caught me by the shirtsleeve. “He is now scorin his turd opera,” he whispered. I tore away from him and stamped out of the building.

Jane was waiting in the car. I climbed in, cranked down the sunroof and opened the air vents.

At home I poured a water glass of gin, held it to my nostrils and inhaled. Jane sat before the air conditioner, her hair like a urinal mop, stinking. Black hairs cut the atmosphere, fruit bits whispered to the carpet. Occasionally the tip of my tongue entered the gin. I sniffed and tasted, thinking of plastic factories and turpentine distilleries and rich sulfurous smoke. On my way to the bedroom I poured a second glass.

In the bedroom I sniffed gin and dressed for dinner. “Jane?” I called, “shouldn’t you be getting ready?” She appeared in the doorway. She was dressed in her work clothes: jeans and sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was gray and hooded. There were yellow stains on the sleeves. I thought of the lower depths of animal cages, beneath the floor meshing. “I figured I’d go like this,” she said. I was knotting my tie. “And I wish you’d stop insisting on baths every night — I’m getting tired of smelling like a coupon in a detergent box. It’s unnatural. Unhealthy.”

In the car on the way to the restaurant I lit a cigar, a cheap twisted black thing like half a pepperoni. Jane sat hunched against the door, unwashed. I had never before smoked a cigar. I tried to start a conversation but Jane said she didn’t feel like talking: talk seemed so useless, such an anachronism. We drove on in silence. And I reflected that this was not the Jane I knew and loved. Where, I wondered, was the girl who changed wigs three or four times a day and sported nails like a Chinese emperor’s? — and where was the girl who dressed like an Arabian bazaar and smelled like the trade winds?

She was committed. The project, the study, grants. I could read the signs: she was growing away from me.

The restaurant was dark, a maze of rocky gardens, pancake-leafed vegetation, black fountains. We stood squinting just inside the door. Birds whistled, carp hissed through the pools. Somewhere a monkey screeched. Jane put her hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear. “Siamang,” she said. At that moment the leaves parted beside us: a rubbery little fellow emerged and motioned us to sit on a bench beneath a wicker birdcage. He was wearing a soiled loincloth and eight or ten necklaces of yellowed teeth. His hair flamed out like a brushfire. In the dim light from the braziers I noticed his nostrils — both shrunken and pinched, as if once pierced straight through. His face was of course inscrutable. As soon as we were seated he removed my socks and shoes, Jane’s sneakers, and wrapped our feet in what I later learned were plantain leaves. I started to object — I bitterly resent anyone looking at my feet — but Jane shushed me. We had waited three months for reservations.

The maître d’ signed for us to follow, and led us through a dripping stonewalled tunnel to an outdoor garden where the flagstones gave way to dirt and we found ourselves on a narrow plant-choked path. He licked along like an iguana and we hurried to keep up. Wet fronds slapped back in my face, creepers snatched at my ankles, mud sucked at the plantain leaves on my feet. The scents of mold and damp and long-lying urine hung in the air, and I thought of the men’s room at the subway station. It was dark as a womb. I offered Jane my hand, but she refused it. Her breathing was fast. The monkey chatter was loud as a zoo afire. “Far out,” she said. I slapped a mosquito on my neck.

A moment later we found ourselves seated at a bamboo table overhung with branch and vine. Across from us sat Dr. and Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo, director of the Primate Center and wife. A candle guttered between them. I cleared my throat, and then began idly tracing my finger around the circular hole cut in the table’s center. The Doctor’s ears were the size of peanuts. “Glad you two could make it,” he said. “I’ve long been urging Jane to sample some of our humble island fare.” I smiled, crushed a spider against the back of my chair. The Doctor’s English was perfect, pure Martha’s Vineyard — he sounded like Ted Kennedy’s insurance salesman. His wife’s was weak: “Yes,” she said, “missing cook here, all roar.” “How exciting!” said Jane. And then the conversation turned to primates, and the Center.

Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo and I smiled at one another. Jane and the Doctor were already deeply absorbed in a dialogue concerning the incidence of anal retention in chimps deprived of Frisbee coordination during the sensorimotor period. I gestured toward them with my head and arched my eyebrows wittily. Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo giggled. It was then that Jane’s proximity began to affect me. The close wet air seemed to concentrate her essence, distill its potency. The U-Hwak-Los seemed unaffected. I began to feel queasy. I reached for the fingerbowl and drank down its contents. Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo smiled. It was coconut oil. Just then the waiter appeared carrying a wooden bowl the size of a truck tire. A single string of teeth slapped against his breastbone as he set the bowl down and slipped off into the shadows. The Doctor and Jane were oblivious — they were talking excitedly, occasionally lapsing into what I took to be ASL, ear- and nose-and lip-picking like a manager and his third-base coach. I peered into the bowl: it was filled to the rim with clean-picked chicken bones. Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo nodded, grinning: “No ontray,” she said. “Appeticer.” At that moment a simian screamed somewhere close, screamed like death itself. Jane looked up. “Rhesus,” she said.

On my return from the men’s room I had some difficulty locating the table in the dark. I had already waded through two murky fountains and was preparing to plunge through my third when I heard Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo’s voice behind me. “Here,” she said. “Make quick, repass now serve.” She took my hand and led me back to the table. “Oh, they’re enormously resourceful,” the Doctor was saying as I stumbled into my chair, pants wet to the knees. “They first employ a general anesthetic — distillation of the chu-bok root — and then the chef (who logically doubles as village surgeon) makes a circular incision about the macaque’s cranium, carefully peeling back the already-shaven scalp, and stanching the blood flow quite effectively with maura-ro, a highly absorbent powder derived from the tamana leaf. He then removes both the frontal and parietal plates to expose the brain …” I looked at Jane: she was rapt. I wasn’t really listening. My attention was directed toward what I took to be the main course, which had appeared in my absence. An unsteady pinkish mound now occupied the center of the table, completely obscuring the circular hole — it looked like cherry vanilla yogurt, a carton and a half, perhaps two. On closer inspection I noticed several black hairs peeping out from around its flaccid edges. And thought immediately of the bush-headed maître d’. I pointed to one of the hairs, remarking to Mrs. U-Hwak-Lo that the rudiments of culinary hygiene could be a little more rigorously observed among the staff. She smiled. Encouraged, I asked her what exactly the dish was. “Much delicacy,” she said. “Very rare find in land of Lincoln.” At that moment the waiter appeared and handed each of us a bamboo stick beaten flat and sharpened at one end.