T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“’Cause you can have her,” he went on, dropping the Nashville twang and reverting to pure Brooklynese. “She’s a whore. I don’t need no whore. Shit,” he spat, looking beyond me to where she sat huddled on the couch with the baby. “Elvis went through a hundred just like her. A thousand.”

Cindy was staring at the floor. I had nothing to say.

“Fuck you both,” he said finally, then turned and marched across the lawn. I watched him slam into the van, fire up the engine, and back out of the driveway. Then the boy who dared to rock was gone.

I looked at Cindy. Her knees were drawn up under her chin and she was crying softly. I knew I should comfort her, tell her it would be all right and that everything would work out fine. But I didn’t. This was no pregnant fifteen-year-old who hated her mother or a kid who skipped cheerleading practice to smoke pot and hang out at the video arcade — this wasn’t a problem that would walk out of my office and go home by itself. No, the problem was at my doorstep, here on my couch: I was involved — I was responsible — and I wanted no part of it.

“Patrick,” she stammered finally. “I–I don’t know what to say. I mean”—and here she was on the verge of tears again—“I feel as if … as if—”

I didn’t get to hear how she felt. Not then, anyway. Because at that moment the phone began to ring. From upstairs, in the bedroom. Cindy paused in mid-phrase; I froze. The phone rang twice, three times. We looked at each other. On the fourth ring I turned and bounded up the stairs.

“Hello?”

“Pat, listen to me.” It was Judy. She sounded breathless, as if she’d been running. “Now don’t hang up. Please.”

The blood was beating in my head. The receiver weighed six tons. I struggled to hold it to my ear.

“I made a mistake,” she said. “I know it. Fred’s a jerk. I left him three days ago in some winery in St. Helena.” There was a pause. “I’m down in Monterey now and I’m lonely. I miss you.”

I held my breath.

“Pat?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m coming home, okay?”

I thought of Joey, of Cindy downstairs with her baby. I glanced out the window at the place next door, vacant once again, and thought of Henry and Irma and the progress of the years. And then I felt something give way, as if a spell had been broken.

“Okay,” I said.

(1983)

Her hands were cold. She held them out for me as I stepped into the parlor. “Mr. Boyle,” announced the maid, and Jane was rising to greet me, her cold white hands like an offering. I took them, said my good evenings, and nodded at each of the pairs of eyes ranged round the room. There were brothers, smallish and large of head, whose names I didn’t quite catch; there was her father, the Reverend, and her sister, the spinster. They stared at me like sharks on the verge of a feeding frenzy. I was wearing my pink boots, my “Great Disasters” T-shirt and my Tiki medallion. My shoulders slumped under the scrutiny. My wit evaporated.

“Have a seat, son,” said the Reverend, and I backed onto a settee between two brothers. Jane retreated to an armchair on the far side of the room. Cassandra, the spinster, plucked up her knitting. One of the brothers sighed. I could see it coming, with the certainty and illogic of an aboriginal courtship rite: a round of polite chit-chat.

The Reverend cleared his throat. “So what do you think of Mrs. Radcliffe’s new book?”

I balanced a glass of sherry on my knee. The Reverend, Cassandra and the brothers revolved tiny spoons around the rims of teacups. Jane nibbled at a croissant and focused her huge unblinking eyes on the side of my face. One of the brothers had just made a devastating witticism at the expense of the Lyrical Ballads and was still tittering over it. Somewhere cats were purring and clocks ticking. I glanced at my watch: only seventeen minutes since I’d stepped in the door.

I stood. “Well, Reverend,” I said, “I think it’s time Jane and I hit the road.” He looked up at the doomed Hindenburg blazing across my chest and smacked his lips. “But you’ve only just arrived.”

There really wasn’t much room for Cassandra in the Alfa Romeo, but the Reverend and his troop of sons insisted that she come along. She hefted her skirts, wedged herself into the rear compartment and flared her parasol, while Jane pulled a white cap down over her curls and attempted a joke about Phaetons and the winds of Aeolus. The Reverend stood at the curb and watched my fingers as I helped Jane fasten her seat belt, and then we were off with a crunch of gravel and a billow of exhaust.

The film was Italian, in black and white, full of social acuity and steamy sex. I sat between the two sisters with a bucket of buttered popcorn. Jane’s lips were parted and her eyes glowed. I offered her some popcorn. “I do not think that I care for any just now, thank you,” she said. Cassandra sat stiff and erect, tireless and silent, like a mileage marker beside a country lane. She was not interested in popcorn either.

The story concerned the seduction of a long-legged village girl by a mustachioed adventurer who afterward refuses to marry her on the grounds that she is impure. The girl, swollen with child, bursts in upon the nuptials of her seducer and the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and demands her due. She is turned out into the street. But late that night, as the newlyweds thrash about in the bridal bed—

It was at this point that Jane took hold of my arm and whispered that she wanted to leave. What could I do? I fumbled for her wrap, people hissed at us, great nude thighs slashed across the screen, and we headed for the glowing EXIT sign.

I proposed a club. “Oh do let’s walk!” Jane said. “The air is so frightfully delicious after that close, odious theatre — don’t you think?” Pigeons flapped and cooed. A panhandler leaned against the fender of a car and drooled into the gutter. I took Jane’s arm. Cassandra took mine.

At the Mooncalf we had our wrists stamped with luminescent ink and then found a table near the dance floor. The waitress’s fingernails were green daggers. She wore a butch haircut and three-inch heels. Jane wanted punch, Cassandra tea. I ordered three margaritas.

The band was re-creating the fall of the Third Reich amid clouds of green smoke and flashing lights. We gazed out at the dancers in their jumpsuits and platform shoes as they bumped bums, heads and genitals in time to the music. I thought of Catherine Morland at Bath and decided to ask Jane for a dance. I leaned across the table. “Want to dance?” I shouted.

“Beg your pardon?” Jane said, leaning over her margarita.

“Dance,” I shouted, miming the actions of holding her in my arms.

“No, I’m very sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid not.”

Cassandra tapped my arm. “I’d love to,” she giggled.

Jane removed her cap and fingered out her curls as Cassandra and I got up from the table. She grinned and waved as we receded into the crowd. Over the heads of the dancers I watched her sniff suspiciously at her drink and then sit back to ogle the crowd with her black satiric eyes.

Then I turned to Cassandra. She curtsied, grabbed me in a fox-trot sort of way and began to promenade round the floor. For so small a woman (her nose kept poking at the moribund Titanic listing across my lower rib cage), she had amazing energy. We pranced through the hustlers and bumpers like kiddies round a Maypole. I was even beginning to enjoy myself when I glanced over at our table and saw that a man in fierce black sideburns and mustache had joined Jane. He was dressed in a ruffled shirt, antique tie and coattails that hung to the floor as he sat. At that moment a fellow terpsichorean flung his partner into the air, caught her by wrist and ankle and twirled her like a toreador’s cape. When I looked up again Jane was sitting alone, her eyes fixed on mine through the welter of heads.