T. Boyle - Riven Rock

It was amazing, it really was, and yet O‘Kane couldn’t help thinking of the poor simple lunatics at the Boston Asylum, all herded into a cage to have the crusted shit blasted off them with high-pressure hoses. But then they weren’t Mr. McCormick, were they? And Mr. McCormick, being a gentleman, was used to gentle things, and O’Kane, being his nurse, applauded anything they could do for him, especially when money was no object. Stimulation? Give him all the stimulation he could stand, just so long as it didn’t overexcite him and push him all the way back down the long tunnel of tube-feeding and diapers.

But everybody in the neighborhood was gathered here now, for drinks and frivolity and the showing of a new Bronco Billy picture from Santa Barbara’s own Flying A Studios, and as O‘Kane stepped into the room with the frantically grinning Mrs. Brush beside him, he felt as pleased as he had on Christmas Day as a boy. Nick’s wife had put up decorations, streamers and such, there was a big spread on a table in the corner and a bar set up and a guy in a tuxedo standing behind it. And balloons, balloons all over the place. The orchestra had been playing an air when he first came to the door, cheerful and fluty, but now they shifted into something you could feel in the soles of your feet and a couple of people got up to dance. He handed Mrs. Brush over to a big glowing bald man who suddenly loomed up on his right — Dr. Ogilvie, Mr. McCormick’s nominal dentist — and headed for the bar.

He ordered a highball and while the bartender was fixing it he glanced over his shoulder to see Katherine standing there not ten feet away, and she laughing at something the woman next to her was saying. She looked good, damned good, all in green and with a little green hat perched up on top of her hair like a bird’s nest. He wasn’t going to talk to her, of course, unless it was strictly necessary, and he turned back to the bar before she could catch him looking. That was when Dr. Brush and Mart elbowed their way in, the doctor flushed and hearty and lecturing Mart about the main and simple reason of something or other. “Eddie!” he cried, and a big arm looped itself over O‘Kane’s shoulder, an arm heavy as a python, and O’Kane could smell liquor on the doctor’s breath. “They treating you all right?”

“Sure. Yeah.” O‘Kane lifted the glass to his lips, whiskey fumes probing at his nostrils, and made believe he was diving for pearls.

“You fellows are all right,” Brush boomed, and he was squeezing Mart under his other arm, squeezing the two of them as if they were prize hams. “But listen. Eddie. I really want to tell you, for the main and simple reason, well, Gladys thinks you’re a prince. And so do I.”

O‘Kane looked at Mart. Mart was clutching a drink, looking big-headed and dazed. It must have been something for him, going from his monk’s cell in the back of the big house to all this.

“Listen. Between us. Because we’re friends and, er, fellow employees of Mr. McCormick, you may have noticed that my wife’s a little, what should we say — excitable? Not to worry. She was a patient once. Of mine, that is. Brilliant woman, one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever known—”

O‘Kane, uncomfortable under the doctor’s grip, gazed out across the room to where Mrs. Brush stood with the dentist, putting her face through all its permutations and showing her teeth like a rabbit at the end of every sequence. She didn’t look all that brilliant. In fact, she looked suspiciously like some of the loonies he’d known at McLean.

“Tourette’s syndrome,” the doctor was saying. “It’s not a form of insanity, not at all, just a weakness. A moral weakness, really. And we’re working on it, we are. You see, her mind races ahead of her body just like an automobile stuck in neutral and the accelerator to the floor, causes her all sorts of embarrassment for the main and simple reason that she refuses to control it… but really, she’s no crazier than you or I, not underneath, and I, er, I appreciate the way you gave her your arm there, Eddie, it was white of you,”

It was then that Dolores Isringhausen walked in with her friend of the vacuous smile and two men with penciled-in mustaches and their hair all slicked down with grease. Or she didn’t walk exactly — she sashayed, rolling her corsetless hips from side to side like a belly dancer, and she managed to make every woman in the place, even Katherine, look like yesterday’s news. In three years, every woman in America would look like her — or try to — all natural lines, legs and boyish figure, with the peeled-acorn hat and eye makeup, but for now she had the stage all to herself, she and her friend, that is. O‘Kane was electrified — he hadn’t expected this — and two emotions simultaneously flooded his system with glandular secretions that made him feel as twitchy as Mrs. Brush: lust and jealousy. Who were those men, and one of them with his hand on her elbow?

In the next moment he was crossing the crowded room, all of Montecito there in their jewels and furs and cravats and nobody worried about the presumptive host of the party locked away in his room in the big house with the iron bars on the windows, not in the least, and it was no small wonder that he himself had been invited. Of course, he’d already seen the picture that afternoon with Mart and Mr. McCormick, but still he had to admit it was decent of Katherine — and Brush, he supposed — to include the nurses in a gathering like this. There were millionaires and tycoons here tonight and he was brushing shoulders with them, and not as somebody’s bootlick or bottle washer either — he was off-duty, a guest like anybody else. That was something, and he knew it and savored it, and he promised himself he’d be on his best behavior, smiling Eddie O‘Kane, quick with a handshake and a witty aside.

He caught up to Dolores at the buffet table, which was all piled up with good things from Diehl’s Grocery and two of Diehl’s best men in monkey suits back there to serve it up. She already had a Jack Rose cocktail in her hand with the long black velvet glove clinging to it like a second skin, and she was laughing at something one of the mustachioed little weasels was saying, her head thrown back, her pulsing white kiss-able throat exposed for anyone to see. It had been three days since he’d gotten to know her in the way that counted most, the way you could keep score by, and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since — he didn’t know her phone number and he didn’t have a car to drive out to her place and nose around. But that was all right. It wasn’t love or anything like that he was feeling, but just a good healthy appetite for second helpings, and he didn’t want to seem overeager. Casual, that was the way he was, smooth as silk.

Still, when he saw the way she was laughing and the guy’s hand touching hers to drive home the joke — and what was so funny? — he couldn’t help bristling, though he knew he shouldn’t and that this wasn’t the place for it and that he had no more right to her than any half-dozen other men, and her husband not the least of them. “Dolores,” he said, in a throat-clearing sort of way, “I see you made it to our little gathering.”

She turned a face to him that was like a mask. His hand was throbbing. Was she going to cut him, was that it? The company too rich for him? Good enough for her in bed but not here amongst all these swells and capitalists? “Eddie,” she said, the voice caught low in her throat, no inflection at all, “how nice to see you again.”

He started in on a little speech about Mr. McCormick, how he was indisposed and what a shame it was he couldn’t attend his own party, playing off the status of being Mr. McCormick’s intimate and puffing himself up as if he were the host and all this his, when the mustachioed character cut him off. “You’re a friend of Stanley’s?” the man said. “I knew him at Princeton,”