T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

“Thank you,” she said in her smallest voice. “Shouldn’t we—?”

“Got them high heels and pretty little ankles, nice earrings, hair all done up, and that smart little tweed suit — of course you know you’re a good-looking woman. Bet it don’t hurt the sales a bit, huh?”

She couldn’t help herself now. All she wanted was to get up from the table and away from those jittery eyes, sale or no sale. “Listen,” she said, “listen to me. There was this woman and she came home and there was this strange car in her garage—”

“No,” he said, “you listen to me.”

“’Panty Rapist Escapes,’” Hilary read aloud in a clear declamatory tone, setting down her coffee mug and spreading out the “Metro” section as if it were a sacred text. “‘Norbert Baptiste, twenty-seven, of Silverlake, dubbed the Panty Rapist because he gagged his victims with their own underthings …’” She broke off to give her husband a look of muted triumph. “You see,” she said, lifting the coffee mug to her lips, “I told you. With their own underthings. “

Ellis Hunsicker was puzzling over the box scores of the previous night’s ball-games, secure as a snail in its shell. It was early Saturday morning, Mifty and Corinne were in the den watching cartoons, and the house alarm was still set from the previous night. In a while, after he’d finished his muesli and his second cup of coffee, he’d punch in the code and disarm the thing and then maybe do a little gardening and afterward take the girls to the park. He wasn’t really listening, and he murmured a halfhearted reply.

“And can you imagine Tina Carfarct trying to tell me we were just wasting our money on the alarm system?” She pinched her voice in mockery: “’I hate to tell you, Hil, but this is the safest neighborhood in L.A.’ Jesus, she’s like a Pollyanna or something, but you know what it is, don’t you?”

Ellis looked up from the paper.

“They’re too cheap, that’s what — her and Sid both. They’re going to take their chances, hope it happens to the next guy, and all to save a few thousand dollars. It’s sick. It really is.”

Night before last they’d had the Carfarcts and their twelve-year-old boy, Brewster, over for dinner — a nice sole amandine and scalloped potatoes Ellis had whipped up himself — and the chief object of conversation was, of course, the alarm system. “I don’t know,” Sid had said (Sid was forty, handsome as a prince, an investment counselor who’d once taught high-school social studies), “it’s kind of like being a prisoner in your own home.”

“All that money,” Tina chimed in, sucking at the cherry of her second Manhattan, “I mean I don’t think I could stand it. Like Sid says, I’d feel like I was a prisoner or something, afraid to step out into my own yard because some phantom mugger might be lurking in the marigolds.”

“The guy in the Reagan mask was no phantom,” Hilary said, leaning across the table to slash the air with the flat of her hand, bracelets ajangle. “Or those two men— white men — who accosted that woman in her own garage—” She was so wrought up she couldn’t go on. She turned to her husband, tears welling in her eyes. “Go on,” she’d said, “tell them.”

It was then that Tina had made her “safest neighborhood in L.A.” remark and Sid, draining his glass and setting it down carefully on the table, had said in a phlegmy, ruminative voice, “I don’t know, it’s like you’ve got no faith in your fellow man,” to which Ellis had snapped, “Don’t be naive, Sid.”

Even Tina scored him for that one. “Oh, come off it, Sid,” she said, giving him a sour look.

“Let’s face it,” Ellis said, “it’s a society of haves and have-nots, and like it or not, we’re the haves.”

“I don’t deny there’s a lot of crazies out there and all,” Tina went on, swiveling to face Ellis, “it’s just that the whole idea of having an alarm on everything — I mean you can’t park your car at the mall without it — is just, well, it’s a sad thing. I mean next thing you know people’ll be wearing these body alarms to work, rub up against them in a crowd and — bingo! — lights flash and sirens go off.” She sat back, pleased with herself, a tiny, elegant blonde in a low-cut cocktail dress and a smug grin, untouched, unafraid, a woman without a care in the world.

But then Sid wanted to see the thing and all four of them were at the front door, gathered round the glowing black plastic panel as if it were some rare jewel, some treasure built into the wall. Ellis was opening the closet to show them the big metal box that contained the system’s “brain,” as the SecureCo woman had called it, when Sid, taken by the allure of the thing, lightly touched the tip of his index finger to the neat glowing red strip at the bottom that read EMERGENCY.

Instantly, the scene was transformed. Whereas a moment earlier they’d been calm, civilized people having a drink before a calm, civilized meal, they were suddenly transformed into hand-wringing zombies, helpless in the face of the technology that assaulted them. For Sid had activated the alarm and no one, least of all Ellis, knew what to do about it. The EMERGENCY strip was flashing wildly, the alarm beep-beep-beeping, the girls and the Carfarcts’ boy fleeing the TV room in confusion, four pairs of hands fluttering helplessly over the box, and Ellis trying to dredge up the disarm code from the uncertain pocket of memory in which it was stored. “One-two-two-one!” Hilary shouted. Tina was holding her ears and making a face. Sid looked abashed.

When at last — after two false starts — Ellis had succeeded in disarming the thing and they’d settled back with their drinks and exclamations of “Jesus!” and “I thought I was going to die,” there was a knock at the door. It was a man in a SecureCo uniform, with nightstick and gun. He was tall and he had a mustache. He invited himself in. “There a problem?” he asked.

“No, no,” Ellis said, standing in the entranceway, heart pounding, acutely aware of his guests’ eyes on him, “it’s a new system and we, uh — it was a mistake.”

“Name?” the man said.

“Hunsicker. Ellis.”

“Code word?”

Here Ellis faltered. The code word, to be used for purposes of positive identification in just such a situation as this, was Hilary’s inspiration. Pick something easy to remember, the SecureCo woman had said, and Hilary had chosen the name of the kids’ pet rabbit, Honey Bunny. Ellis couldn’t say the words. Not in front of this humorless man in the mustache, not with Sid and Tina watching him with those tight mocking smiles on their lips …

“Code word?” the man repeated.

Hilary was sunk into the couch at the far end of the coffee table. She leaned forward and raised her hand like a child in class, waving it to catch the guard’s attention. “Honey Bunny,” she said in a gasp that made the hair prickle at the back of Ellis’ neck, “it’s Honey Bunny.”

That had been two nights ago.

But now, in the clear light of Saturday morning, after sleeping the sleep of the just — and prudent (Panty Rapist — all the Panty Rapists in the world could escape and it was nothing to him) — feeling self-satisfied and content right on down to the felt lining of his slippers, Ellis sat back, stretched, and gave his wife a rich little smile. “I guess it’s a matter of priorities, honey,” he said. “Sid and Tina can think what they want, but you know what I say — better safe than sorry.”

When she talked about it afterward — with her husband at Gennaro’s that night (she was too upset to cook), with her sister, with Betty Berger on the telephone — Giselle said she’d never been so scared in all her life. She meant it too. This was no horror story clipped from the newspaper, this was real. And it happened to her.