T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

One time, a stiff windy day in early March, I couldn’t stand the sight of four walls any more and I walked the six miles across town and all the way out Depew Street. It was an ugly day. Clouds like steel wool, a dirty crust of ice underfoot, dog turds preserved like icons in the receding snowbanks. The whole way over there I kept thinking up various scenarios: Wendy and I would take the bus for California, then write Marie to come join us; we’d fly to the Virgin Islands and raise the kid on the beach; Marie would have an accident. When I got there, Dr. Ziss’s Mercedes was parked out front. I thought that was pretty funny, him being there in the middle of the day, but then I told myself he was her doctor after all. I turned around and walked home.

Nathaniel Jr. was born in New York City at the end of June, nine pounds, one ounce, with a fluff of orange hair and milky gray eyes. Wendy never looked so beautiful. The hospital bed was cranked up, her hair, grown out now, was fresh-washed and brushed, she was wearing the turquoise earrings I’d given her. Marie, meanwhile, was experiencing the raptures of the saints. She gave me a look of pride and fulfillment, rocking the baby in her arms, cooing and beaming. I stole a glance at Wendy. There were two wet circles where her nipples touched the front of her gown. When she put Nathaniel to her breast I thought I was going to faint from the beauty of it, and from something else too: jealousy. I wanted her, then and there.

Dr. Ziss was on the scene, of course, all smiles, as if he’d been responsible for the whole thing. He pecked Marie’s cheek, patted the baby’s head, shook my hand, and bent low to kiss Wendy on the lips. I handed him a cigar. Three days later Wendy had her five thousand dollars, the doctor and the hospital had been paid off; and Marie and I were back in Westchester with our son. Wendy had been dressed in a loose summer gown and sandals when I gave her the check. I remember she was sitting there on a lacquered bench, cradling the baby, the hospital corridor lit up like a clerestory with sunbeams. There were tears — mainly Marie’s — and promises to keep in touch. She handed over Nathaniel as if he was a piece of meat or a sack of potatoes, no regrets. She and Marie embraced, she rubbed her cheek against mine and made a perfunctory little kissing noise, and then she was gone.

I held out for a week. Changing diapers, heating formula, snuggling up with Marie and little Nathaniel, trying to feel whole again. But I couldn’t. Every time I looked at my son I saw Wendy, the curl of the lips, the hair, the eyes, the pout — in my distraction, I even thought I heard something of her voice in his gasping howls. Marie was asleep, the baby in her arms. I backed the car out and headed for Depew Street.

The first thing I saw when I rounded the corner onto Depew was the doctor’s Mercedes, unmistakable, gunmetal gray, gleaming at the curb like a slap in the face. I was so startled to see it there I almost ran into it. What was this, some kind of postpartum emergency or something? It was 10:00 A.M. Wendy’s curtains were drawn. As I stamped across the lawn my fingers began to tremble like they do when I’m tugging at the net and I can feel something tugging back.

The door was open. Ziss was sitting there in T-shirt and jeans, watching cartoons on TV and sipping at a glass of milk. He pushed the hair back from his brow and gave me a sheepish grin. “David?” Wendy called from the back room. “David? Are you going out?” I must have looked like the big loser on a quiz show or something, because Ziss, for once, didn’t have anything to say. He just shrugged his shoulders. Wendy’s voice, breathy as a flute, came at us again: “Because if you are, get me some sweetcakes and yogurt, and maybe a couple of corn muffins, okay? I’m hungry as a bear.”

Ziss got up and walked to the bedroom door, mumbled something I couldn’t hear, strode past me without a glance and went on out the back door. I watched him bend for a basketball, dribble around in the dirt, and then cock his arm for a shot at an imaginary basket. On the TV, Sylvester the cat reached into a trash can and pulled out a fish stripped to the bones. Wendy was standing in the doorway. She had nothing to say.

“Look, Wendy,” I began. I felt betrayed, cheated, felt as if I was the brunt of a joke between this girl in the housecoat and the curly-headed hotshot fooling around on the lawn. What was his angle, I wondered, heart pounding at my chest, what was hers? “I suppose you two had a good laugh over me, huh?”

She was pouting, the spoiled child. “I fulfilled my part of the bargain.”

She had. I got what I’d paid for. But all that had changed, couldn’t she see that? I didn’t want a son, I didn’t want Marie; I wanted her. I told her so. She said nothing. “You’ve got something going with Ziss, right?” I said, my voice rising. “All along, right?”

She looked tired, looked as if she’d been up for a hundred nights running. I watched her shuffle across the room into the kitchenette, glance into the refrigerator, and come up with ajar of jam. She made herself a sandwich, licking the goo from her fingers, and then she told me I stank of fish. She said she couldn’t have a lasting relationship with me because of Marie.

“That’s a lot of crap, and you know it. ”I was shouting. Ziss, fifty feet away, turned to look through the open door.

“All right. It’s because we’re—” She put the sandwich down, wiped a smear of jelly from her lip. “Because we move in different circles. ”

“You mean because I’m not some fancy-ass doctor, because I didn’t go to college.”

She nodded. Slow and deliberate, no room for argument, she held my eyes and nodded.

I couldn’t help it. Something just came loose in my head, and the next second I was out the door, knocking Ziss into the dirt. He kicked and scratched, tried to bite me on the wrist, but I just took hold of his hair and laid into his face while Wendy ran around in her Japanese housecoat, screeching like a cat in heat. By the time the police got there I’d pretty well closed up both his eyes and rearranged his dental work. Wendy was bending over him with a bottle of rubbing alcohol when they put the cuffs on me.

Next morning there was a story in the paper. Marie sent Alex DeFazio down with the bail money, and then she wouldn’t let me in the house. I banged on the door halfheartedly, then tried one of the windows, only to find she’d nailed it shut. When I saw that, I was just about ready to explode, but then I figured what the hell and fired up the Rambler in a cloud of blue smoke. Cops, dogs, kids, and pedestrians be damned, I ran it like a stock car eight blocks down to the dock and left it steaming in the parking lot. Five minutes later I was planing across the river, a wide brown furrow fanning out behind me.

This was my element, sun, wind, water, life pared down to the basics. Gulls hung in the air like puppets on a wire, spray flew up in my face, the shore sank back into my wake until docks and pleasure boats and clapboard houses were swallowed up and I was alone on the broad gray back of the river. After a while I eased up on the throttle and began scanning the surface for the buoys that marked my gill nets, working by rote, the tight-wound spool in my chest finally beginning to pay out. Then I spotted them, white and red, jogged by the waves. I cut the engine, coasted in and caught hold of the nearest float.

Wendy, I thought, as I hauled at the ropes, ten years, twenty-five, a lifetime: every time I look at my son I’ll see your face. Hand over hand, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, the net heaving up out of the swirling brown depths with its pounds of flesh. But then I wasn’t thinking about Wendy any more, or Marie or Nathaniel Jr. — I was thinking about the bottom of the river, I was thinking about fins and scales and cold lidless eyes. The instant I touched the lead rope I knew I was on to something. This time of year it would be sturgeon, big as logs, long-nosed and barbeled, coasting up the riverbed out of some dim watery past, anadromous, preprogrammed, homing in on their spawning grounds like guided missiles. Just then I felt a pulsing in the soles of my sneakers and turned to glance up at the Day Liner, steaming by on its way to Bear Mountain, hundreds of people with picnic baskets and coolers, waving. I jerked at the net like a penitent.