T. Boyle - World's End

In his very next moment of consciousness he was aware of a new voice — Mardi’s — projecting forcefully from the front of the house. “Hey! Anybody home? Fa-la-la-la-la! Deck the halls and all that shit!” The door slammed behind her. “Walter?”

He propped himself up on one elbow, smoothed down his mustache and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “In here,” he said.

He’d been seeing Mardi three or four times a week since the afternoon of the ghost ships, and feeling bad about it too. Here he was, married less than four months, and already he was running around behind his wife’s back. Worse: he was doing it while she was at work earning the money he spent on beer and cigarettes and rib-eye steak. When he let himself think about it, he felt like a shit — a real, First Class, Select, Grade A, certifiable shit. On the other hand, he was still soulless, hard and free, wasn’t he? Married or not. What would Meursault have done in his situation? Fucked them both, that’s what. Or neither of them. Or somebody else altogether. Sex didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was Walter Truman Van Brunt, nihilist hero, Walter Truman Van Brunt, hard as stone.

Besides, Mardi was something he couldn’t get enough of. She was dangerous, wild, unpredictable — she made him feel as if he were living on the edge, made him feel bad in the best sense of the word, like James Dean, like Belmondo in Breathless. While Jessica made him feel bad, period. She came home from work, stinking of formalin, her eyes red, a sack of groceries clutched to her high tight bosom while he lay sprawled on the couch amidst the refuse of the day, and she never said a word. Never asked if he’d looked for a job or made up his mind about going back to school, never reproached him for the sink full of dishes, the beer bottles set up on the coffee table like bowling pins, the haze of incinerated pot that clung to the curtains, seeped into the furniture and filmed the windows. No. She just smiled. Loved him. Went to work on the dishes with one hand and whipped up some trout amandine, fettuccine Alfredo or Texas hot chili and a vitamin-choked spinach salad with the other, all the while singing along to Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell in a high pure soprano that would have made all the angels in heaven faint with the superabundant beauty of it. And oh, did he feel bad.

He knew now that all along he’d wanted to hurt her, alienate her, test her — did she love him, did she really love him? No matter what? If he was bad, if he was worthless — the worthless son of a worthless father — then he would play his role to the hilt, scourge himself with it, scourge her. He wanted her to come home with the blender for Aunt Katrina and walk into that dark connubial bedroom, her cheeks abloom with good will to men, the golden foil of the gift-wrapped packages crepitating against her chest, sacred hymns and timeless carols on her lips, and see him there, naked, thrusting away at Mardi Van Wart. He must have wanted it — else why would he have done it?

They couldn’t hear the car, it was true, but the front door was unmistakable. Bang. “Walter?” Footsteps across the floor, the rustle of packages, “Walter?”

But it was Mardi too. On top of him, surging against him, pinning her mouth to his with all the frantic haste of resuscitation. She heard the door slam. She heard the footsteps and Jessica’s voice — she heard them as well as he did. He moved to break away from her, to hide, run, dissemble — he was in the shower, Mardi had a headache and went in to lie down, no, that wasn’t her car out front — but she wouldn’t let go of him, wouldn’t stop. He was inside her when Jessica came through the door. Then, only then, did Mardi look up.

Jessica’s father came for her things two days later. Walter was passed out on the couch, drunk from hating himself. The door slammed and John Severum Wing, of Wing, Crouder & Wing, Investment Counsellors, was on him. “Get up, you son of a bitch,” he hissed. Then he kicked the couch. John Wing, forty-eight years old, Rotarian, Little League sponsor, churchgoer, father of four, as imperturbable as a box turtle drowsing in the sun, snaked out a Hush Puppy-clad foot and shook the couch to its particle-board frame. Walter sat up. John Wing, standing over him, delivered sotto voce insults. “Sleazeball,” he whispered. “Scum. Creep.”

Walter had the feeling that his father-in-law would have gone on indefinitely in the same vein, plumbing the lower strata of his vocabulary, driving the spikes ever deeper, but for the sudden appearance of Jessica. For at that moment, the hair swept back from her high pale patrician brow and a Kleenex pressed to her face as if to protect her from the odor of something long dead, Jessica darted through the door and disappeared into the bedroom. In the silence that fell over them like the aftershock of an artillery barrage, Walter, sitting, and John Wing, standing, listened to the thump and scrape of drawers flung violently open, the screech of hangers jerked hastily from the rack, the clatter of knickknacks, perfume bottles, gewgaws, curios and all the other hard-edged odds and ends of life flung carelessly together in sack and box. And they listened to something else too, a subtler sound, pitched lower, a quirk of hypothalamus and larynx: Jessica was weeping.

Walter stood. He fumbled for a cigarette.

John Wing kicked the coffee table. He kicked the wall. He launched a pillow into the kitchen as if it were a football splitting the uprights. “Answer me,” he said. “How could you do it?”

Walter hated himself at that moment, oh yes indeed, and he felt bad to the bone. He lit that cigarette, let it dangle from his underlip like one of Belmondo’s, and blew the smoke in John Wing’s face. Then he lifted his leather jacket from the chair and sauntered out the door, shaky but somehow serene too. The door shut behind him and the wind caught him in the face. Squinting against the smoke of the cigarette, he straddled the Norton, gave it a kick that would have wrenched the leg off a John Wing, and obliterated the universe with a twist of the throttle.

But now, of course, standing there in the hallway of a strange house in the waning minutes of the old year, aching to take a piss, surrounded by strange faces and bedeviled by fools and halfwits, he had his regrets. Jessica wouldn’t talk to him. (He must have called fifty times, must have sat out in front of her parents’ house on the Norton fifty more till John Wing stormed out and threatened to call the police.) Tom Crane wouldn’t talk to him either. Not yet, anyway. And while Hector had sat down and shared a pitcher of beer with him, he kept looking at him as if he’d developed a case of twentyfour-hour leprosy or something. Even Hesh and Lola blamed him. He’d begun to feel like a character in a country and western song, lost the most precious thing in my life, o lonesome me, and all the rest of it. Now, of course, now that he didn’t have her — couldn’t have her — he wanted her more than anything. Or did he?

“And Mordor,” the jerk was saying, “what do you think that shit stands for, huh?”

Just then the bathroom door swung open and Galadriel strutted out, shooting Walter a withering glance and lifting her nose as if she’d stepped in dogshit. Her brother — if indeed he was her brother — was too wound up to acknowledge her. He tightened his grip on Walter’s arm and leaned into him: “The good ol’ U.S. of A.,” he said. “That’s what.”

So small a pill, half the size of an aspirin, and Walter was rushing with light. Jessica. The upturned nose, the leggy leg, the martyr in the kitchen: who needed her? He had Mardi, didn’t he? “Tell it to the gooks,” he said, staring the jerk down. Then he was in the bathroom, bolting the door behind him.