T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Petra’s kimono was slit to mid-thigh. Her skin was dark, even, smooth as the slap of a masseuse’s palm. I felt deeply appreciative of that revelation of skin, that sweet tapering triangle of flesh, and was fully lost in its contemplation when she turned to me and asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t. She was standing there in the nimbus of light, looking at me as if I were the UNICEF poster child. “You know what,” she said finally, two cups of fresh noxious Postum steaming in her hand, “you’re a real mess.” I liked the tone of this observation, liked, her concern. After all, I hadn’t come to her doorstep looking for indifference, abuse or rejection, but for sympathy. Sympathy, and perhaps even a little tenderness. I lifted my eyebrows and shrugged.

Her voice dropped. “You may as well spend the night,” she said. “Or the morning, I mean.”

If I’d been feeling the effects of my cathartic night, feeling leaden and listless, suddenly I was alert as a bloodhound at dinnertime. My first impulse was to decline the invitation ("You don’t have to do that; oh, no, no, I couldn’t"), but I suppressed it. “I’d like that,” I said. I looked her in the eye as she set the ceramic mug down before me — the mug was implausibly ringed by what seemed to be the raised figures of dancing nymphs and satyrs — and added, “That would be great. Really. You wouldn’t believe how depressing the farm is. Especially now.”

I was playing for sympathy, trying to gauge her mood. Was she asking me to spend the night in the way a Sister of Mercy might ask an invalid in out of the cold, or was she asking me to share her bed, clutch her, embrace her, make love to her like a genius? Out of uncertainty, out of nervousness, I began to rattle on about conditions at the summer camp — the stink of burned garbage and raw excrement, the dance of the rats and spiders, the humorless air, slashing sun, filthy mattresses and reluctant water taps — when she cut me off. “You’ll want a shower,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” I agreed, nodding vigorously, “a shower.”

I was standing suddenly, watching her closely, fumbling toward the first move, a touch, a kiss, never certain, suspended in the moment like an insect caught in a web. She stood three feet from me. Morning light, ceramic pig, a stove that shone like the flank of a Viking rocket. She sipped her Postum, watching me in turn, her lips pursed to blow the steam from her cup. Now, I thought, hesitating.

“The shower’s through here,” she said, setting down her mug and drifting through the kitchen in a liquid rush of dragons and lotus flowers. The living room was on the left, her bedroom on the right. She stood at the door of the penumbral bedroom — bed, dresser, patchwork quilt — ushering me forward. Dimly visible in the far corner, a clutch of ceramic figures gazed at me with stricken, sorrowful eyes that seemed to speak of lost chances and the bankruptcy of hope. I followed her through the room, past the broad variegated plain of the big double bed and the eyes of the gloomy figures. Then the bathroom door swung open, a splash of underwater light caught in the thick, beaded, sun-struck windows. “Here’s a towel,” she said, shoving terrycloth at my bandaged hands, and then I was in the bathroom, door closing, click, and she was gone.

My pants were a trial. Fingers like blocks of cement, fumbling with the catch, the zipper. Scorched, frayed, reeking of smoke and dried sweat, the pants finally dropped to the floor. Then the rest: sneakers fit for the wastebasket, T-shirt a rag, socks and Jockey shorts smelling as if they’d been used to mop up the locker room after the big game. The tiles felt cool under my feet, the windows glowed. I was nude, in Petra’s bathroom. Though the shower awaited, I couldn’t resist poking through her medicine cabinet — take two in the morning, two in the evening and feed the rest to the ducks — and peeking into her dirty-clothes hamper. I studied her undergarments, her makeup, her artifacts and totems. I used her toothbrush. Counted her birth-control pills, took a swig of Listerine and swirled it round my mouth, found a plastic vial of what looked to be Valium, shook out two and swallowed them. Then I slid back the opaque door of the shower stall, stepped inside and took the first hissing rush of water like a bride in the ritual bath.

One minute passed. Two. Water swirling round my feet, my head bowed to the spray, hands held high to keep the bandages dry. When the stall door slid back, I turned like a supplicant before the oracle. Petra was smiling. The kimono dropped from her and that naked interesting leg engulfed her, pulled her forward. The water beat at me, at us, purifying, cleansing, doing the work of absolution. “I thought you might need help,” she murmured, holding me. “What with your hands and all.”

Phil was waiting for us amid the plastic ferns in the hallway-cum-lobby of the Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital. At first I didn’t recognize him. He had his back to us, and he was slumped in a burnt-orange imitation-leather easy chair, thumbing through a twelve-year-old copy of Reader’s Digest. An old man, so wasted his flesh looked painted on, dozed in a wheelchair beside him, while a thick, stolid, broad-faced woman who might have been Nina Khrushchev’s cousin from San Jose sat directly across from him, stolidly peeling a banana. I stepped through the main door, Petra at my side, and took in the scuffed linoleum, battered gurneys, the pine desk, which now bore a placard reading “Receptionist,” the little group ranged round the cheap furniture and plastic plants. Nina’s cousin gave us a brief bovine glance and then turned back to her banana. I saw the nodding old man, I saw the back of Phil’s head (which was not Phil’s head at all, but the shorn and gauze-wrapped cranium of some stranger, some poor unfortunate from whose afflictions one instinctively and charitably averts one’s eyes). “Maybe he’s still in his room or something,” I said, steering Petra toward the receptionist’s desk.

Gone was the sour night-nurse. In her stead, a motherly type beamed up at us, dispensing smiles like individually wrapped candies. “May I help you?”

Beyond her, the emergency room stood empty, no trace of the kid’s bloody passage. “Phil Cherniske,” I said, with an odd sense of déeAjéaG vu that took me back to the Eldorado County jail. I’d phoned the hospital from Petra’s apartment half an hour earlier, and Phil had told me he was all right — a little sore, that was all — and that he’d meet me in the lobby at two. It was ten after. “He’s due to be discharged?”

She gave me a peculiar look, a web of creases suddenly emerging to snatch the smile from her lips. “But he’s right over there,” she said, indicating the trio among the ferns.

Petra and I turned our heads in unison, the old man in the wheelchair woke with a start and shouted something incoherent, Nina’s cousin tucked the nether end of the banana in the pocket of her cheek and Phil looked up from his magazine. “Phil,” I blurted, my voice echoing down the corridor, “over here.”

He stood. Pale as a fish, dressed in his soot-blackened jeans, greasy workboots and a pale green hospital gown that fell away in back to reveal bandages upon bandages, he looked like an invalid, a refugee, one of the homeless. They’d shaved the crown of his head, and he wore a listing slab of sticking-plaster and gauze on the left side as if it were a jaunty white beret. I crossed the hallway and gave him the Beau Geste hug, gingerly patting his bandaged shoulders with my bandaged hands. “Christ,” I said, stepping back, “you look terrible.”

Phil’s stubborn eyes had come into alignment, and he was surveying me head to foot with a tight sardonic smile. I was wearing the punctuated sneakers, my beat pants and a Boy Scout shirt of Petra’s that was so small it looked like a bib. And my bandages, of course. “You don’t exactly look like the Barclay man yourself, you know.”