T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

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 sports coat 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.

“Glad you could make it,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Yeah, me too,” I breathed, wondering if I was making a mistake.

I followed him into the living room, where spavined boxes and green plastic trash bags stuffed with underwear and sweaters gave testimony to an ongoing adventure in moving. The place was as close and dark as I’d remembered, but where before there’d been doilies, bric-a-brac, and end tables with carved feet, now there was a plaid sofa, an exercycle, and a dirty off-white beanbag lounger. Gone was the shrine to marital fidelity, replaced by a Fender amp, a microphone stand, and an acoustic guitar with capo and pickup. (Henry was gone too, dead of emphysema, and Irma was in a nursing home on the other side of town.) There was a stereo with great black monolithic speakers, and the walls were hung with posters of Elvis. I looked at Joey. He was posed beside a sneering young Elvis, rocking back and forth on the heels of his boots. “Pretty slick,” I said, indicating his get-up.

“Oh, this?” he said, as if surprised I’d noticed. “I’ve been rehearsing — trying on outfits, you know.”

I’d figured he was some sort of Elvis impersonator, judging from the van, the clothes, and the achieved accent, but aside from the hair I couldn’t really see much resemblance between him and the King. “You, uh — you do an Elvis act?”

He looked at me as if I’d just asked if the thing above our heads was the ceiling. Finally he just said, “Yeah.”

It was then that Cindy emerged from the kitchen. She was wearing a white peasant dress and sandals, and she was holding a glass of wine in one hand and a zucchini the size of a souvenir baseball bat in the other. “Patrick,” she said, crossing the room to brush my cheek with a kiss. I embraced her ritualistically — you might have thought we’d known each other for a decade — and held her a moment while Joey and Elvis looked on. When she stepped back, I caught a whiff of perfume and alcohol. “You like zucchini?” she said.

“Uh-huh, sure.” I was wondering what to do with my hands. Suddenly I remembered the bottle and held it up like a turkey I’d shot in the woods. “I brought you this.”

Cindy made a gracious noise or two, I shrugged in deprecation—“ It only half full,” I said — and Joey ground his toe into the carpet. I might have been imagining it, but he seemed agitated, worked up over something.

“How long till dinner?” he said, a reedy, adolescent whine snaking through the Nashville basso.

Cindy’s eyes were unsteady. She drained her wine in a gulp and held out the glass for me to refill. With Scotch. “I don’t know,” she said, watching the glass. “Half an hour.”

“Because I think I want to work on a couple numbers, you know?”

She gave him a look. I didn’t know either of them well enough to know what it meant. That look could have said, “Go screw yourself,” or, “I’m just wild about you and Elvis”—I couldn’t tell.

“No problem,” she said finally, sipping at her drink, the zucchini tucked under her arm. “Patrick was going to help me in the kitchen, anyway — right, Patrick?”

“Sure,” I said.

At dinner, Joey cut into his braciola, lifted a forkful of tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini to his lips, and talked about Elvis. “He was the most photographed man in the history of the world. He had sixty-two cars and over a hundred guitars.” Fork, knife, meat, vegetable. “He was the greatest there ever was.”

I didn’t know about that. By the time I gave up pellet guns and minibikes and began listening to rock and roll, it was the Doors, Stones, and Hendrix, and Elvis was already degenerating into a caricature of himself. I remembered him as a bloated old has-been in a white jumpsuit, crooning corny ballads and slobbering on middle-aged women. Besides, between the Chivas and the bottle of red Cindy had opened for dinner, I was pretty far gone. “Hmph,” was about all I could manage.

For forty-five minutes, while I’d sat on a cracked vinyl barstool at the kitchen counter, helping slice vegetables and trading stories with Cindy, I’d heard Joey’s rendition of half a dozen Elvis classics. He was in the living room, thundering; I was in the kitchen, drinking. Every once in a while he’d give the guitar a rest or step back from the microphone, and I would hear the real Elvis moaning faintly in the background: Don’t be cruel l To a heart that’s true or You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog .

“He’s pretty good,” I said to Cindy after a particularly thunderous rendition of “Jailhouse Rock.” I was making conversation.

She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so,” she said. The baby lay in a portable cradle by the window, giving off subtle emanations of feces and urine. It was asleep, I supposed. If it weren’t for the smell, I would have guessed it was dead. “You know, we had to get married,” she said.

I made a gesture of dismissal, tried for a surprised expression. Of course they’d had to get married. I’d seen a hundred girls just like her — they passed through the guidance office like flocks of unfledged birds flying in the wrong direction, north in the winter, south in the summer. Slumped over, bony, eyes sunk into their heads, and made up like showgirls or whores, they slouched in the easy chair in my office and told me their stories. They thought they were hip and depraved, thought they were nihilists and libertines, thought they’d invented sex. Two years later they were housewives with preschoolers and station wagons. Two years after that they were divorced.