T. Boyle: After the Plague

But somebody was talking to her, Little Drake, it was Little Drake, leaning across Jason and addressing her as if she were one of them. “So Paula,” he was saying. “Paula?”

She swivelled her head toward him, hungry now, impatient. She didn’t want to hang around the bar and schmooze about Tommy Lasorda and O.J. and Proposition 187 and how Phil Aguirre had broken both legs and his collarbone in the surf at Rincon; she wanted to go to the Pasta Bowl and carbo-load. “Yes?” she said, trying to be civil, for Jason’s sake.

“You going to put them to shame on Sunday, or what?”

Jason was snubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, collecting his money from the bar. They were on their way out the door — in ten minutes she’d be forking up fettucine or angel hair with black olives and sun-dried tomatoes while Jason regaled her with a satiric portrait of his day and all the crazies who’d passed through his shop. The little man with the white hair didn’t require a dissertation, and besides, he couldn’t begin to appreciate the difference between what she was doing and the ritualistic farce of the tobacco-spitting, crotch-grabbing “athletes” all tricked out in their pretty unblemished uniforms up on the screen over his head, so she just smiled, like a babe, and said, “Yeah.”

Truly, the race was nothing, just a warm-up, and it would have been less than nothing but for the puzzling fact that Zinny Bauer was competing. Zinny was a professional, from Hamburg, and she was the one who’d cranked past Paula like some sort of machine in the final stretch of the Ironman last year. What Paula couldn’t fathom was why Zinny was bothering with this small-time event when there were so many other plums out there. On the way out of Clubber’s, she mentioned it to Jason. “Not that I’m worried,” she said, “just mystified.”

It was a fine, soft, glowing night, the air rich with the smell of the surf, the sun squeezing the last light out of the sky as it sank toward Hawaii. Jason was wearing his faded-to-pink 49ers jersey and a pair of shorts so big they made his legs look like sticks. He gave her one of his hooded looks, then got distracted and tapped at his watch twice before lifting it to his ear and frowning. “Damn thing stopped,” he said. It wasn’t until they were sliding into the car that he came back to the subject of Zinny Bauer. “It’s simple, babe,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and letting his face go slack. “She’s here to psych you out.”

He liked to watch her eat. She wasn’t shy about it — not like the other girls he’d dated, the ones on a perpetual diet who made you feel like a two-headed hog every time you sat down to a meal, whether it was a Big Mac or the Mexican Plate at La Fondita. No “salad with dressing on the side” for Paula, no butterless bread or child’s portions. She attacked her food like a lumberjack, and you’d better keep your hands and fingers clear. Tonight she started with potato gnocchi in a white sauce puddled with butter, and she ate half a loaf of crusty Italian bread with it, sopping up the leftover sauce till the plate gleamed. Next it was the fettucine with Alfredo sauce, and on her third trip to the pasta bar she heaped her plate with mostaccioli marinara and chunks of hot sausage — and more bread, always more bread.

He ordered a beer, lit a cigarette without thinking, and shovelled up some spaghetti carbonara, thick on the fork and sloppy with sauce. The next thing he knew, he was staring up into the hot green gaze of the waitperson, a pencil-necked little fag he could have snapped in two like a breadstick if this weren’t California and everything so copacetic and laid back. It was times like this when he wished he lived in Cleveland, even though he’d never been there, but he knew what was coming and he figured people in Cleveland wouldn’t put up with this sort of crap.

“You’ll have to put that out,” the little fag said.

“Sure, man,” Jason said, gesturing broadly so that the smoke fanned out around him like the remains of a pissed-over fire. “Just as soon as I”—puff, puff—“take another drag and”—puff, puff—“find me an ashtray somewhere … you wouldn’t happen”—puff, puff—“to have an ashtray, would you?”

Of course the little fag had been holding one out in front of him all along, as if it were a portable potty or something, but the cigarette was just a glowing stub now, the tiny fag end of a cigarette — fag end, how about that? — and Jason reached out, crushed the thing in the ashtray and said, “Hey, thanks, dude — even though it really wasn’t a cigarette but just the fag end of one.”

And then Paula was there, her fourth plate of the evening mounded high with angel hair, three-bean salad, and wedges of fruit in five different colors. “So what was that all about? Your cigarette?”

Jason ignored her, forking up spaghetti. He took a long swig of his beer and shrugged. “Yeah, whatever,” he said finally. “One more fascist doing his job.”

“Don’t be like that,” she said, using the heel of her bread to round up stray morsels on her plate.

“Like what?”

“You know what I mean. I don’t have to lecture you.”

“Yeah?” He let his eyes droop. “So what do you call this then?”

She sighed and looked away, and that sigh really irritated him, rankled him, made him feel like flipping the table over and sailing a few plates through the window. He was drunk. Or three-quarters drunk anyway. Then her lips were moving again. “Everybody in the world doesn’t necessarily enjoy breathing through a tube of incinerated tobacco, you know,” she said. “People are into health.”

“Who? You maybe. But the rest of them just want to be a pain in the ass. They just want to abrogate my rights in a public place”—abrogate, now where did that come from? — “and then rub my nose in it.” The thought soured him even more, and when he caught the waitperson pussyfooting by out of the corner of his eye he snapped his fingers with as much pure malice as he could manage. “Hey, dude, another beer here, huh? I mean, when you get a chance.”

It was then that Zinny Bauer made her appearance. She stalked through the door like something crossbred in an experimental laboratory, so rangy and hollow-eyed and fleshless she looked as if she’d been pasted onto her bones. There was a guy with her — her trainer or husband or whatever — and he was right out of an X-Men cartoon, all head and shoulders and great big beefy biceps. Jason recognized them from Houston — he’d flown down to watch Paula compete in the Houston Ironman, only to see her hit the wall in the run and finish sixth in the women’s while Zinny Bauer, the Amazing Bone Woman, took an easy first. And here they were, Zinny and Klaus — or Olaf or whoever — here in the Pasta Bowl, carbo-loading like anybody else. His beer came, cold and dependable, green in the bottle, pale amber in the glass, and he downed it in two gulps. “Hey, Paula,” he said, and he couldn’t keep the quick sharp stab of joy out of his voice — he was happy suddenly and he didn’t know why. “Hey, Paula, you see who’s here?”

The thing that upset her was that he’d lied to her, the way her father used to lie to her mother, the same way — casually, almost as a reflex. It wasn’t his birthday at all. He’d just said that to get her out because he was drunk and he didn’t care if she had to compete the day after tomorrow and needed her rest and peace and quiet and absolutely no stimulation whatever. He was selfish, that was all, selfish and unthinking. And then there was the business with the cigarette — he knew as well as anybody in the state that there was an ordinance against smoking in public places as of January last, and still he had to push the limits like some cocky immature chip-on-the-shoulder surfer. Which is exactly what he was. But all that was forgivable — it was the Zinny Bauer business she just couldn’t understand.