T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

The sky was overcast and the wind was still blowing a steady gale — it threw sand in my face as I made my way down to the cove where the Tsunamis kept their inflatable raft. There were birds everywhere — gulls whitening the sky, cormorants diving for fish, penguins loitering among the rocks as if they’d been carved of wood. Elephant seals and their pups sprawled on the beach; right whales spouted in the bay. It was like a National Geographic Special. I took a few shots of the seals, then worked my way down the shoreline until I found Grace and Melia perched atop a sand dune with a pair of binoculars and a notepad. Grace was wearing a windbreaker, white shorts, and a scarf; Melia was six years old.

Grace waved. “Want to go out in the boat?” she called.

I stood in water up to my knees, bracing the raft, while Grace pulled the starter cord and Melia held my Bronica. As we lurched off into the persistent swells I found myself thinking of Nick, Gary, and Ernie, but my initial fears proved unfounded: Grace was a faultless and assured pilot. We cut diagonally across the bay toward a distant sand spit. Gulls keened overhead, seals barked, spray flew, and then, before I could even get my camera focused, a big right pounded the water with his massive flukes, not thirty feet from us. “That was Bob Tail,” Grace said, laughing.

I was wiping the spray from my lens. “How could you tell?”

“Easy. There’s a piece missing from his left fluke.”

We cruised the bay, and I was introduced to thirty whales or so, some recognized by name, others anonymous. I saw Gray Spot, Cyclops, Farrah Fawcett, and Domino, and actually got close enough to touch one of them. He was skimming the surface, black as a barge and crusted over with barnacles and lice, the huge yellowed mesh of his baleen exposed like the insides of a piano. Grace wheeled the raft round on him, throttle cranked down to idle, and as we came up alongside him I reached out and patted his cool, smooth hide. It was like patting a very wet horse the size of a house. I laid my open palm against the immensity of the whale’s flank and for one mad moment thought I could feel the blood coursing through him, the colossal heart beating time with the roll of the tides and the crash of distant oceans; I felt I was reaching out and touching the great steaming heart of the planet itself. And then, in a rush of foam, he was gone.

For the next two weeks I spent mornings, afternoons — and when the light was good — evenings out on the bay. Stephanie came out with us once or twice, but preferred beachcombing with the girls; Shuhei was busy with the other boat, running up to Punta Tombo and back — something to do with his sonar dishes. He was gathering data on the above-water sounds of the right whale, while Grace was busy surveying the local population for size, color, distinguishing characteristics. She was also intent on observing their breeding behavior.

One afternoon we came upon a female floating belly up. Two males — one an adolescent no more than two-thirds her size — were nudging her, shoving at her great inert form with their callused snouts like a pair of beavers trying to maneuver a log. Grace cut the engine and pulled out her notepad. “Is she dead?” I asked.

Grace laughed. The sun was climbing, and she held up a hand to shade her eyes as she looked at me. “They’re mating,” she said. “Or about to.” “A ménage à trois?”

She explained it, patiently. The female was rejecting her suitors, heaving her working parts from the water to avoid being taken forcibly. The reason for the cold flipper was anybody’s guess. Perhaps she was tired, or suffering from a cold, or simply discriminating. She did have a problem, though. Since she couldn’t breathe while inverted, she’d have to right herself every fifteen minutes or so to take a quick breath. And then they’d be on her.

The first time she rolled over we recognized her as Domino, so named for the symmetrical arrangement of callosities on her forehead. She was an adept coquette: rolling, spouting, filling her lungs, and turning belly up again before her suitors had a chance. I made some sort of joke about the prom and the back seat of a Studebaker. Grace giggled, the raft bobbed, we had peanut butter sandwiches — and waited.

Grace told me about growing up over her father’s sushi bar in Little Tokyo, about dropping out of veterinary school to study oceanography at Miami, about Osaka and Shuhei. I told her about the crested tit and the capybara, and was in the middle of a devastatingly witty aperçu of the Junior Miss world when suddenly the raft was rammed from behind and tossed into the air like a bit of driftwood. A third male, big as an express train, had come charging past us in the heat of his passion, intent on Domino. We were shaken, but unhurt. The raft was right side up, the camera round my neck, the notepad in Grace’s lap.

Meanwhile, it became clear that the interloper was not about to stand on ceremony. He chased off his rivals, pounded the water to a froth with his tail, forced Domino over, and ravished her. It was frightening, appalling, fascinating — like nothing I’d ever imagined. They re-enacted the birth of Surtsey, the consolidation of the moon, the eruption of Vesuvius. He slid beneath her, belly to belly, locked his flippers in hers and pitched into her. Leviathan indeed.

I was swollen with emotion, transported, ticking with excitement. So awestruck I hadn’t taken a single photograph. Grace’s hand was on my knee. The raft rose and settled, rose and settled, as if keeping time with each monumental thrust and heave. Somehow — I have no clear recollection of how it happened — we were naked. And then we were on the floor of the raft, gently undulating rubber, the cries of gulls, salt sea spray, locked in a mystery and a rhythm that defied the drift of continents and the receding of the waters.

A month later, in New York, I ran into Harry Macey at a bar. “So what gives with Grace and Shuhei?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

I hadn’t heard? There’d been some sort of blowup between them. A vicious temper. Stormy. Hadn’t I noticed? Well, he’d really taken it to her: black eye, scratched cornea, right arm in a sling. She was in San Francisco with the children. He was in Miami, brooding. The project was dead.

Harry ground out his cigarette in the ashtray he held in his palm. “Did you notice any strain between them when you were down there?”

“None.”

He grinned. “Cabin fever, I guess, huh? I mean, I take it it’s pretty bleak down there.” He ordered me another drink. “So listen,” he said. “You interested in flying out to the Azores? There’s a big broil going on over that little local whaling operation — the Portuguese thing.”

I downed my drink in a gulp. I felt like a saboteur, a killer, the harpoonist crouched in the bow of the rushing boat. “If you want to know the truth,” I said, holding his eyes; “I’m just a little bit tired of whales right now.”

(1979)

I

It is a women’s restaurant. Men are not permitted. Women go there to be in the company of other women, to sit in the tasteful rooms beneath the ancient revolving fans and the cool green of spilling plants, to cross or uncross their legs as they like, to chat, sip liqueurs, eat. At the door, the first time they enter, they are asked to donate twenty-five cents and they are issued a lifetime membership card. Thus the women’s restaurant has the legal appearance of a private club, and its proprietors, Grace and Rubie, avoid running afoul of the antidiscrimination laws. A women’s restaurant. What goes on there, precisely, no man knows. I am a man. I am burning to find out.