T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“He here?” craning her neck to scan the crowd.

“No.” I took a sip of my drink, and then lied: “The music was hot.”

This was polite, and a neat conversational ploy as well, but Aorta didn’t have a chance to respond. A girl had appeared beside her, and through the sweat, runny mascara and streaked pancake makeup, I saw that she was the Lugosi impersonator. “Vena, this is Felix — he’s a friend of Vogelsang’s.”

Vena shot me a quick cool glance and then turned to Aorta. “You see who’s in the crowd tonight?”

Aorta, never one to let her emotions show, imperceptibly widened her eyes as Vena named a name that meant nothing to me. “Who’s that?” I said, and both women turned to look at me as if I’d just emerged from seventeen years in a Siberian gulag. From the gist of what passed between them, I gathered finally that he was a record producer.

“Let’s tear his head off,” Vena said, lighting a cigarette. “I think we ought to open with ’Burn Ward’ and then hit him with ’Pink and Dead.’“

“The music was hot the first set,” I said. “Anybody want a drink?” Elbows jostled me, voices shrieked with laughter, the ubiquitous jukebox started up with a roar. Vena was leaning into Aorta and shouting something in her ear. I tapped Aorta’s arm, and she looked up a moment to give me a glance as empty as the spaces between the star— Drink? I pantomimed. Do you want a drink? — and then she turned back to Vena. What could I say? I backed up to the bar and ordered another tequila. I don’t know what I’d expected from Aorta — sympathy, excitement, conversation, sex — but it was clear I wasn’t going to get it. Feeling sorry for myself, feeling as alone and friendless as a dieter at the feast of life, I went home to bed.

Now, buffeted by the chattering exhaust, billowing fumes and dust devils, I snuck a look at Gesh and saw that he hadn’t exactly been exhilarated and revivified by the holiday either. He was staring out the window of the car, moodily sucking at his cigarette, stolid and silent as a rock. “Some bust of a weekend,” I said, without taking my eyes from the road.

Gesh merely grunted, but there was an unfathomable depth of bitterness in that grunt, and though he hadn’t said anything about his date with Yvette, I understood that it, too, had been a bust. He morosely tossed his cigarette out the window and into a clump of grass beneath a FIRE HAZARD sign, and then turned to me. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said.

“Yvette?”

Gesh flicked off the radio. “I wasn’t going to tell you this — it’s embarrassing — but the more I think about it, it’s so pathetic it’s funny.” He paused to reach behind him and fumble through the cooler for a splinter of ice. “You know, right from the beginning I thought there was something strange about her — it was too good to be true, right? Paradise. A bar full of beautiful women and all of them hot. At first I thought she might be a hooker or something, the way she came on to me in the afternoon, but she wasn’t. We did some kissing and groping at a booth in back and she didn’t say anything so I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else. ’I’ve got an appointment,’ she says. ’But I’m free tonight.’

“Okay. So I’m all pumped up and I go over to her apartment thinking I’ve got it made and she meets me at the door in a pair of jeans and a tube top. She looks fantastic, but there’s something about her that just doesn’t sit right. She’s big. Her shoulders are too wide. Then it hits me. But no, I think, that’s crazy, and I look at her again and she’s beautiful, stunning, like she just stepped off the cover of some women’s magazine.

“We have a drink. She starts coming on like a nymphomaniac but I’m holding back because of that funny feeling I had. I’m on top of her, I’m trying to get her top down and her hands are all over me. ’Listen,’ I say, ’I don’t know how to put this, I mean I hope you won’t be offended or anything, and this is probably insane, but could you tell me something — it’s really important to me.’

“She looks up at me, cold green eyes, eyes like the water under the Bay Bridge when you go fishing. ’What?’ she says in this tiny little voice.

“ ’Christ, I don’t know: this is crazy. But tell me, do you … I mean, you wouldn’t happen to have a penis by any chance?’

“Suddenly her eyes look like they’re sinking into her head, her pupils shriveling up, and she looks like she’s about to cry. And then she holds her hand up in front of my face, two fingers an inch apart. ’Yes,’ she whispers, and I jerk back as if my shirt’s on fire, ’but it’s only a little one.’ “

It must have been around seven when we hit the outskirts of Willits. The sun was dropping in the west and igniting the yellow grass of the hills, trees began to leap up along the road, and we passed a succession of neat little houses, as alike as pennies. Gesh was asleep, his head propped up on one arm and playing to and fro like a toy on a spring. I was thinking of the summer camp, of the plants flourishing in the stark sun, of the candy man who was going to buy the whole crop — cash up front — and of what I could do with a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars, when I noticed that the car in front of me, a VW Bug of uncertain vintage, was behaving erratically. The car had slowed to a crawl and seemed to be listing to the right, as if the road had given way beneath it. As I drew closer and swung out to pass, I saw that the car was mottled with primer paint, bumper-blasted and rusted, and that the right front tire was flat to the rim.

I was already accelerating, humping up alongside to roar past and reduce the crippled Bug to a dot in the rearview mirror, when I turned to glance at the driver. What I saw was arresting: eyes you could fall into, a nimbus of black ringlets, the long, sculpted fingers and the open palm waving frantically for help. There was a desperation in that face, a needfulness that made my heart turn over. What she saw in return could hardly have inspired confidence — i.e., the battered Toyota, Gesh’s big lolling shaggy head, my intrusive eyes and sweat-plastered hair — but she waved all the harder. My foot fell back from the accelerator.

Having been raised in New York, I was accustomed to turning my back on all such appeals for aid from strangers. I routinely gave the stiff arm to panhandlers, slammed the door in the faces of Bible salesmen, Avon ladies and Girl Scouts, ground the receiver into its cradle at the hint of a solicitation and strenuously avoided all scenes of human misery and extremity. Ignore him, my mother would say of a man twisted like a burned root, the stubs of three crudely sharpened pencils clenched in his trembling fist. Don’t get involved, she’d hiss as a couple slugged it out over a carton of smashed eggs in the supermarket parking lot. But this was different. This was no half-crazed wino, wife-beater or terminal syphilitic — this was a flower, a beauty, a girl with a face that belonged to Amigoni’s Venus. She pulled over to the shoulder, her damaged wheel rim clanking like a cowbell, and I swung up just ahead of her.

She was agile, urgent, pouring from the car in a spill of flesh. Nike sneakers, satiny blue jogger’s shorts, a halter that left her shoulders and navel bare. Gesh had momentarily jolted awake as I rumbled up onto the shoulder, but now he drifted off again, snores ratchetting mechanically through his dried-up nostrils. I stepped out of the car.

“Oh, listen, thanks a lot,” she gasped, snatching for breath like a miler. “I’m really glad somebody stopped — have you got a jack?”

She was standing directly in front of me now, too close in her urgency, shoulders shrugged and palms spread in entreaty. Her mouth was wide, nose cut like an L , skin dark. Italian, I thought. Or Greek.