T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

The kid was wearing black ankle boots. He ground the toe of the right one into the pavement as if stubbing out a cigarette, then glanced up and said, “I don’t drink.”

“How about you?” I said, grinning at the girl.

“Sure, thanks,” she said, reaching out a slim, veiny hand bright with lacquered nails. She gave the kid a glance, then took the beer, saluted me with a wink, and raised it to her lips. The baby never stirred.

I felt awkward with the two open bottles, so I gingerly set one down on the grass, then straightened up and took a hit from the other. “Patrick,” I said, extending my free hand.

The kid took my hand and nodded, a bright wet spit curl swaying loose over his forehead. “Joey Greco,” he said. “Glad to meet you. This here is Cindy.”

There was something peculiar about his voice — tone and accent both. For one thing, it was surprisingly deep, as if he were throwing his voice or doing an impersonation. Then too, I couldn’t quite place the accent. I gave Cindy a big welcoming smile and turned back to him. “You from down South?” I said.

The toe began to grind again and the hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, but he suppressed it. When he looked up at me his eyes were alive. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

A jay flew screaming out of the maple in back of the house, wheeled overhead, and disappeared in the hedge. I took another sip of beer. My face was beginning to ache from grinning so much and I could feel the sweat leaching out of my armpit and into my last clean T-shirt.

“No,” he said again, and his voice was pitched a shade higher. “I’m from Brooklyn.”

Two days later I was out back in the hammock, reading a thriller about a double agent who turns triple agent for a while, is discovered, pursued, captured, and finally persuaded under torture to become a quadruple agent, at which point his wife leaves him and his children change their surname. I was also drinking my way through a bottle of Chivas Regal Fred had given my wife for Christmas, and contemplatively rubbing tanning butter into my navel. The doorbell took me by surprise. I sat up, plucked a leaf from the maple for a bookmark, and padded round the house in bare feet and paint-stained cutoffs.

Cindy was standing at the front door, her back to me, peering through the screen. At first I didn’t recognize her: she looked waifish, lost, a Girl Scout peddling cookies in a strange neighborhood. Just as I was about to say something, she pushed the doorbell again. “Hello,” she called, cupping her hands and leaning into the screen.

The chimes tinnily reproduced the first seven notes of “Camptown Races,” an effect my wife had found endearing; I made a mental note to disconnect them first thing in the morning. “Anybody home?” Cindy called.

“Hello,” I said, and watched her jump. “Looking for me?”

“Oh,” she gasped, swinging round with a laugh. “Hi.” She was wearing a halter top and gym shorts, her hair was pinned up, and her perfect little toes looked freshly painted. “Patrick, right?” she said. “That’s right,” I said. “And you’re Cindy.”

She nodded, and gave me the sort of look you get from a haberdasher when you go in to buy a suit. “Nice tan.”

I glanced down at my feet, rubbed a slick hand across my chest. “I’m on vacation.”

“That’s great,” she said. “From what?”

“I work up at the high school? I’m in Guidance.”

“Oh, wow,” she said, “that’s really great.” She stepped down off the porch. “I really mean it — that’s something.” And then: “Aren’t you kind of young to be a guidance counselor?”

“I’m twenty-nine.”

“You’re kidding, right? You don’t look it. Really. I would’ve thought you were twenty-five, maybe, or something.” She patted her hair tentatively, once around, as if to make sure it was all still there. “Anyway, what I came over to ask is if you’d like to come to dinner over at our place tonight.”

I was half drunk, the thriller wasn’t all that thrilling, and I hadn’t been out of the yard in four days. “What time?” I said.

“About six.”

There was a silence, during which the birds could be heard cursing one another in the trees. Down the block someone fired up a rotary mower. “Well, listen, I got to go put the meat up,” she said, turning to leave. But then she swung round with an afterthought. “I forgot to ask: are you married?”

She must have seen the hesitation on my face.

“Because if you are, I mean, we want to invite her too.” She stood there watching me. Her eyes were gray, and there was a violet clock in the right one. The hands pointed to three-thirty.

“Yes,” I said finally, “I am.” There was the sound of a stinging ricochet and a heartfelt guttural curse as the unseen mower hit a stone. “But my wife’s away. On vacation.”

I’d been in the house only once before, nearly eight years back. The McCareys had lived there then, and Judy and I had just graduated from the state teachers’ college. We’d been married two weeks, the world had been freshly created from out of the void, and we were moving into our new house. I was standing in the driveway, unloading boxes of wedding loot from the trunk of the car, when Henry McCarey ambled across the lawn to introduce himself. He must have been around seventy-five. His pale, bald brow swept up and back from his eyes like a helmet, square and imposing, but the flesh had fallen in on itself from the cheekbones down, giving his face a mismatched look. He wore wire-rim glasses. “If you’ve got a minute there,” he said, “we’d like to show you and your wife something.” I looked up. Henry’s wife, Irma, stood framed in the doorway behind him. Her hair was pulled back in a bun and she wore a print dress that fell to the tops of her white sweat socks.

I called Judy. She smiled, I smiled, Henry smiled; Irma, smiling, held the door for us, and we found ourselves in the dark, cluttered living room with its excess furniture, its framed photographs of eras gone by, and its bric-a-brac. Irma asked us if we’d like a cup of tea. “Over here,” Henry said, gesturing from the far corner of the room.

We edged forward, smiling but ill at ease. We were twenty-two, besotted with passion and confidence, and these people made our grandparents look young. I didn’t know what to say to them, didn’t know how to act: I wanted to get back to the car and the boxes piled on the lawn.

Henry was standing before a glass case that stood atop a mound of doilies on a rickety-looking corner table. He fumbled behind it for a moment, and then a little white Christmas bulb flickered on inside the case. I saw a silver trowellike thing with an inscription on it and a rippled, petrified chunk of something that looked as if it might once have been organic. It was a moment before I realized it was a piece of wedding cake.

“It’s from our golden anniversary,” Henry said, “six years ago. And that there is the cake knife — can you read what it says?”

I felt numb, felt as if I’d been poking around in the dirt and unearthed the traces of a forgotten civilization. I stole a look at Judy. She was transfixed, her face drawn up as if she were about to cry: she was so beautiful, so rapt, so moved by the moment and its auguries, that I began to feel choked up myself. She took my hand.

“It says ‘Henry and Irma, 1926–1976, Semper Fidelis.’ That last bit, that’s Latin,” Henry added, and then he translated for us.

Things were different now.

I rapped at the flimsy aluminum storm door and Joey bobbed into view through the dark mesh of the screen. He was wearing a tight black sportcoat with the collar turned up, a pink shirt, and black pants with jagged pink lightning bolts ascending the outer seam. At first he didn’t seem to recognize me, and for an instant, standing there in my cutoffs and T-shirt with half a bottle of Chivas in my hand, I felt more like an interloper than an honored guest — she had said tonight, hadn’t she? — but then he was ducking his head in greeting and swinging back the door to admit me.