T. Boyle - World's End

Unfortunately, the grand and triumphal procession of his thoughts suddenly pulled up lame. For there, outside the window, in full Indian drag and shouldering a bundle the size and shape of a buffalo’s head, was Joanna. Back. Early. Hauling garbage out of the station wagon in full view of the legal secretary and the wheezing old ass from Hopewell Junction. But what was she doing home already? he thought in rising panic. Wasn’t she supposed to be up in Jamestown overseeing the canned succotash drive or some such thing? Suddenly he was moving, nodding his way out of range of the Mott sisters’ waxen smiles, shaking off the auto mechanic’s query about BTUs and heating costs, trying desperately to head her off.

He was too late.

The parlor door eased open and there she was, in fringed buckskin and plastic beads, her skin darkened to the color of mountain burgundy. “Oh,” she faltered, glancing around the room in confusion and finally settling on her husband, “I saw all the cars … but it just — it’s open house, then — is that it?”

Silence gripped the room like fear.

The nuns looked bewildered, the secretary appalled; Ginny Outhouse smiled tentatively. It was Lula, coming forward with the tray of pâté and crackers, who broke the spell. “Want some canopies, Mizz Van Wart?” she said. “You must be half-starved after that drive.”

“Thank you, Lula, no,” Joanna said, dropping the bundle to the floor with a clatter, “I had some — some dried meat on the way down.”

By now, Depeyster had moved forward stiffly to greet her. Muriel had begun to gush small talk (“How are you dear, so good to see you again, you’re looking fit, still rescuing the Indians I see”), and the murmur of conversation had resumed among the others.

Depeyster was mortified. LeClerc and Ginny were old friends — they knew of Joanna’s growing eccentricity, and it was nothing. Or almost nothing. And Walter was his protegé, no problem there. But these others, the Mott sisters and these strangers — what must they think? And then it came to him. He’d take them aside, one by one, that’s what he’d do, and explain that his wife’s getup was part of the spirit of the open house, touching base with the aboriginal inhabitants of the Valley in a spontaneous bit of historical improvisation and all that — cute, wasn’t it?

Trie thought calmed him, and he was turning to the shorter of the nuns with an anecdote on his lips, when the door flew open and Mardi, the wayward daughter, burst into the room. “Hello, hello, everyone!” she shouted, “isn’t it a fantastic day?” She was wearing an imitation leopard-skin bikini that showed more of her than her father cared to know about, and her skin was nearly as red as her mother’s with overexposure to the sun. She went straight for the sherry decanter, downed a glass, made a sour face, then downed another.

It was too much, it was impossible.

Depeyster turned away from the horror of the scene, fumbling for a pinch of cellar dust to sprinkle over his tea, the mechanic at his elbow, nuns agape, the legal secretary gathering up her things to go. “Oh, hi, LeClerc,” he heard his daughter say in a voice as false and unctuous as an insurance salesman’s. “Must be a bear to heat this place,” the mechanic opined.

Next thing he knew, Mardi was leading Walter out of the room—“Come on,” she purred, “I want to show you something upstairs”—the nuns were thanking him for a lovely afternoon, Joanna had thrown open her satchel in the middle of the Turkish rug and was offering Indian pottery for sale, and LeClerc and Ginny were talking about dinner. “How about that Italian place in Somers?” Ginny said. “Or the Chinese in Yorktown?”

And then he was standing at the front door, numbly shaking hands with the mechanic, who’d laid out five dollars apiece for a pair of unglazed Indian ashtrays that looked like a failed kindergarten project (what were they supposed to be, anyway — fish?). “Mind if I take a look at the plumbing on my way out?” The mechanic — he was a young man, bald as an egg — gave him a warm, almost saintly look. “I’d really like to see what you did with the pipes and those three-foot walls.”

“Or that steak and lobster joint in Amawalk? What do you think, Dipe?” LeClerc said, pulling him away from the mechanic.

What did he think? The Mott sisters were covering their retreat with a desperate barrage of clichés and insincerities, the old boy from Hopewell Junction announced in a clarion voice that he was going to need help getting to the bathroom, and the legal secretary left without a word. Dazed, defeated, traumatized, he couldn’t say what he thought. The day was in ruins.

For Walter, on the other hand, the day had just begun.

He’d been sitting there with LeClerc Outhouse, uncomfortable in his seersucker suit and throat-constricting tie, his lower legs aching from the rigors of the estate tour, discussing, without candor and with little conviction, the moral imperative of the U.S. presence in Indo-china and the crying need to bomb the gooks into submission with everything we had. And now, here he was, following Mardi’s compelling backside up the stairs and into the dark, enticing, black-lit refuge of her room. She was talking trivialities, chattering — Did he know that Hector had joined the marines? Or that Herbert Pompey landed a gig with the La Mancha road company? Or that Joey’s band broke up? She wasn’t seeing Joey any more, did he know that?

They were in her room now, and she turned to look at him as she delivered this last line. The walls were painted black, the shades drawn. Behind her, a poster of Jimi Hendrix, his face contorted with the ecstasy of feedback, glowed wickedly under the black light. Walter gave her a cynical smile and eased himself down on the bed.

Actually, he didn’t know that Hector had joined the marines or that Herbert was going on the road — he hadn’t set foot in the Elbow since he left the hospital. And as for Joey, the only emotion that might have stirred in him had he heard that the band hadn’t merely broken up but burst open and fallen to pieces in unidentifiable fragments would have been joy. Mardi had hurt him. Cut him to the quick. Touched him where Meursault could never have been touched. And he was all the better for it. Stronger. Harder and more dispassionate than ever, cut adrift from his anchors — from Jessica, from Tom, from Mardi and Hesh and Lola — the lone wolf, the lonesome cowboy, the single champion and seeker after the truth. Love? It was shit.

No. He hadn’t seen Mardi, Tom, Jessica — any of them. He’d been seeing Miss Egthuysen, though. Twenty-seven years old, slit skirts, lips like butterflies. And he’d been seeing Depeyster. A lot. Learning the business, learning history. He’d moved out of the clapboard bungalow in Kitchawank Colony and taken his own place — a vine-covered guesthouse behind the big old place overlooking the creek in Van Wartville. And the Norton was gone too. He drove an MGA now, sleek, throaty and fast.

Mardi pulled the door closed. Her hair was in her face, the flat flawless plane of her belly showed a bruise of sunburn, a gold chain clasped her ankle. She crossed the floor to drop the needle on a record, and the room opened up with a cataract of drums and a thin manic drone of guitar. Walter was still smiling when she turned to him again. “What did you want to show me?” he said.

She padded back across the room, a paradigm of flesh — Walter thought about his ancestors and how inflamed the mere sight of an ankle would get them — and held out a tightly closed fist. “This,” she said, uncurling her fingers to reveal a fat yellow joint. She waited half a beat, then unfastened her halter and wriggled out of the leopard-skin panties. “And this,” she whispered.