T. Boyle - World's End

He brought his face around slowly, and his eyes were strange with that shifting vacant gaze she’d come to recognize over the past few weeks. “I’ve got to go out,” he said, glancing away again. “With Piet. I’ve got to help Piet with his car.”

“Piet?” She threw the name back at him like a curse. “Piet?” She could see him, Piet, as pale as a hairless little grub, an ineradicable smirk on his face. “What about me? What about your son? Do you realize we haven’t done anything as a family for what — months now?”

He only shrugged. His upper lip trembled, as if he were fighting back a wicked leering little smile that said Yes, yes, I’m guilty, I’m a shit, abuse me, hate me, divorce me. He couldn’t hold her eyes.

They’d been married nearly four years — didn’t that mean anything to him? What was wrong? What happened to the man she’d fallen in love with, the daredevil with the quick smile who’d flown under the Bear Mountain Bridge and swept her off her feet?

He didn’t know. He was tired, that was all. He didn’t want to argue.

“Look at me,” she said, seizing him by the arms as he rose to go, the coarse fabric of the gown bunching under her fists. “You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?” Her voice rose to a lacerating wail that filled her head till she thought it would burst. “Aren’t you?”

She knew in that instant that she was wrong, and the knowledge crumpled her like a balled-up sheet of foil. It wasn’t another woman. It wasn’t the Crane/Mohonk conspiracy or the forty hours a week at the foundry either. She was looking into the depths of him and what she saw there was as final and irrevocable as the drop of a guillotine: he was already gone.

The paper was done, and now he had the cap and gown, artifacts of his accomplishment. He slept in them through the remainder of that week, wore them to work, fluttered into Outhouse’s Tavern like the scholar-gypsy, the mortarboard raked back on his head as if it had fallen out of the sky and miraculously lighted there. She saw him in the soft light of morning as he pulled on his steel-toed boots, and she saw him silhouetted against the harsh yellow lamp in the living room as he staggered in at night: that week, that dismal fractured week that began with his commencement and ended with the concert, he didn’t spend a single evening at home.

She remonstrated at dawn, pleaded at midnight, spat out her fury and despair through the small hours of the morning. He was impervious. He lay in bed, drunk, the tattered gown wound around his legs, the breath whistling through his lips. At the sound of the alarm, he started up out of bed, fumbled into his boots and staggered out the door — without coffee, without cornflakes, without a hello or goodbye. And so it went until Saturday, the day of the concert. On that mild and fateful morning, Truman was up at first light, grinning wildly at her, spouting one-liners like a desperate comedian up against an immovable audience. He whipped up a batch of pancakes, fried eggs and sausages, clowned around the kitchen for Walter with a colander on his head. Could it be all right after all? she wondered. The pancakes were on the table, Walter was giggling at his silly Daddy, Christina smiled for the first time in a week, and Truman, leering like a court jester, like a zany, like a madman pressed to the bars of his cage, tore the ragged academic gown from his back and sent it hurtling across the room and into the wastebasket in a high arcing jump shot. Then, with a wink, he disappeared into the bedroom and returned a moment later in a sparkling pristine polo shirt — a shirt she’d never seen before, a miracle of a shirt — still creased with newness and striped in glorious bands of red, white and blue.

Walter went off with his grandparents to spend the day amidst the fascinating fishes of the Hudson, while Truman and Hesh loaded the sound equipment into the back of Hesh’s Plymouth and Christina made sandwiches, cookies, a thermos of iced tea. Was she humming to herself? Smiling over her private thoughts? She’d seen it in his eyes, seen that he was dead to her inside, and she didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to believe that this morning of the concert was a new beginning, radiant and propitious. He was recovering, coming back to her — it had been the pressure after all, and now it was over. He’d got his degree, worn his robe to tatters. So what if he’d been out letting off steam? It was only natural.

Wrapping sandwiches, she thought of the concert of the year before, at the pavilion in the Colony, when they’d sat on a blanket in the grass, holding hands, Walter asleep beside them. Robeson sang “Go Down, Moses,” he sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and something from Handel’s “Messiah,” and she slid into the cradle of Truman’s arms and closed her eyes to let the great deep thrumming voice quaver on the sounding board of her body. There was no Piet then, no manila folder, no Crane/Mohonk conspiracy. There was only Truman, her husband, the man with a smile for the world, the athlete, the scholar, the party acolyte and hero — only Truman, and her.

And then the morning was gone and she was collating the pages of her pamphlets and thinking how maybe next weekend they could go up to Rhinebeck or someplace — just to get away for a couple of days. They could stay at that old inn on the river, and maybe go sailing or horseback riding. Her fingers were ink-stained. It was three o’clock, four. She was sitting by the window and listening to the radio, waiting for her husband and Hesh to get back from their last-minute conference with Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum, when she glanced up to see Hesh’s Gillette-blue Plymouth swing into the driveway. She was out the door, picnic basket in one hand, A&P bag of literature in the other, before the car rolled to a stop. “Hey,” she was about to call out, “I was beginning to think you forgot all about me,” but she caught herself. For at that moment, with fear and loathing and a sinking sense of defeat, she saw that they were not alone. There, perched between them like a ventriloquist’s dummy, his naked little hands braced against the dashboard and his face locked in a mad evil sneer of triumph, was Piet.

When she looked back on that night, the night that broke her life in two, she saw faces. Piet’s face, as it was in the car, insinuated in some unspeakable way between her husband and herself. Truman’s face, turned away from her, hard and unsmiling. Hesh’s face: bluff, honest, opened wide to her as she slipped into the seat beside him, numb and composed for death as he lay unconscious on the scuffed pine boards of the stage while the criminals and brownshirts howled like demons in the dark. And then there were the faces of the mob itself: the rabid women thumbing their noses, eyes popping with hate; the boy who’d leaned forward to spit on the windshield; a man she recognized from the butcher shop in Peterskill who’d bared his teeth like a dog, cupped his genitals in both hands and then clasped the crook of his arm in the universal gesture of defiance and contempt. A day passed, two, three, four, a week, a month, and still she saw them. Though she struggled to escape them, though she shut her eyes fast, paced the floor, fought for sleep, those faces haunted her. They were there, ugly and undeniable, when she started up in the morning from the fitful sleep that overtook her at first light, they were there in the afternoon as she sat sobbing on the davenport, and in the maw of the night when the dark conjured its images. These were her ghosts, this her attack of history.

It began in the deeps of that first night, when the nervous phone calls had ceased and Hesh’s blood had dried to a crust on the sleeve of her blouse, when she’d got to the end of the list of hospitals in the Westchester-Putnam phone book and found that none had admitted a bleeding athlete with hair the color of tarnished copper and a torn polo shirt, when she pictured him lying unconscious in a ditch or crawling home like a dog struck down on the highway. She sat by the phone, listless, the eyes sunk back in her head, willing him to call. He didn’t call. The night held on, tenacious, implacable. From the back room came the arhythmic click and scrape of Walter’s teeth, grinding, bone on bone. And then, caught in the window, hovering over the coleus, peering out from behind the radio console, the faces began to show themselves. Piet’s face, Truman’s, Hesh’s, the twisted feral mug of the man from the butcher shop.