T. Boyle - World's End

Tom was fine. And yes, he was still living in the shack. And though he didn’t look it — and didn’t feel it — he was glad to see Walter. Or so he heard himself saying, the words dropping from his mouth as though he were a grinning little wooden dummy and someone else was doing the talking: “I’m glad to see you.”

“Me too,” Walter said. “It’s been a while.”

The two considered the weightiness of this observation for a moment, while strangely silent shoppers glided past them, each affixed to his or her own cart. Tom stooped for the smashed orange, and was surreptitiously reinserting it in the display pyramid, when Walter caught him with the question he’d been dreading: “Seen Jessica lately?”

Now, while the aforementioned love that had played so big a part in transforming Tom Crane’s life has not, to this juncture, been named, her identity should come as no surprise. That love, of course, was Jessica. For whom else had the saint silently yearned all his miserable life — or for years, anyway? Whom else had he dreamed of marrying even as Walter slipped the ring on her finger and the sky outside the shack grew as dark and turbulent as his own tempestuous feelings? Who else had sat between him and Walter at the movies while he burned to take her hand, kiss her throat, blow in her ear? Could he begin to count the times he’d sat transfixed with lust as she’d tried on clothes in a dress shop, licked at a double scoop of Bavarian fudge chocolate swirl ice cream or read aloud to him from Franny and Zooey or The Dharma Bums in her soft, hesitant, little-girl voice? Or the times he’d envisioned the sweet, tapering, blondpussied length of her stretched out beside him in his musty hermit’s bed?

Jessica. Yes, Jessica.

Hurt, bewildered, disoriented, subject to sudden attacks of snuffling and nose-blowing, knee-knocking and sulks, she’d come to him, her dear old platonic friend, for comfort. And he’d plied her with fried okra and brown rice with shredded carrots and pine nuts, with the peace of a winter’s night, a spring morning, the everlasting and restorative midsummer’s eves at the cabin, with birds, fireflies, the trill of lovesick toads, the timeless tranquility that holds beyond the range of streetlights and paved roads. What could he say? One thing led to another. Love bloomed.

Walter was crazy. Walter was crippled. Walter was gloomy, angry, self-destructive. In his bliss, in his jealously guarded happiness, the saint of the forest forgot all about his old friend and boon companion. Walter had gone over to the other side now — working with that fascist Van Wart, not just for him — and it wasn’t as if he hadn’t rejected her, after all. Humiliated her, kicked her aside like a piece of trash. No, Tom Crane didn’t feel any guilt, not a shred of it. Why should he? Of course, for all that, as he stood there puzzling over Walter’s tight-cropped hair with the razor-slash part and vanishing sideburns, he couldn’t help but think of Jessica, stuffing underwear, sheets and filth-stiffened jeans into the washer at the laundromat next door — or, more particularly, of the fact that she was due to join him any minute now.

“J-Jessica?” he stammered in response to Walter’s query. “Yes. No. I mean, I quit that Con Ed gig, did I tell you?”

Walter’s smile faded. There was something of it in his eyes still, but now his lips were pursed and the lines of his forehead lifted in surprise.

“You know, with Jessica? At Indian Point?”

“No, I didn’t know,” Walter murmured, turning aside to sift through a basket of plums, the dark bruised fruit like strange coin in his hand, “—I just … wondered … you know, if she’s okay and all.”

The saint of the forest threw a nervous glance up the aisle, past the checkout counters, the slouching boxboys and impatient housewives, to the automatic door. It was just an ordinary supermarket door — one way in, one way out — but suddenly it had taken on a new and hellish aspect.

“So you don’t see much of her anymore either, huh?” Walter said, dropping a handful of plums into a plastic bag. Tom noticed that he was bracing himself against the cart now, using it as an old woman with fused hips might use an aluminum walker.

“Well, no, I wouldn’t say that. …” He took a deep breath. What the hell, he thought, might as well tell him — he’ll find out sooner or later anyway. “What I mean is, uh”—but then, why spoil a beautiful afternoon? — “actually, you know, I think I left my wallet in the car and I think I better, um, well—”

But it was too late.

Here she was, Jessica, sweeping through the door like a poster come to life, like Miss America stepping over the prostrate forms of the second, third and fourth runners up, the light in her hair, her flawless posture, her golden knees. He saw the soft anticipatory smile on her lips, watched the graceful sweep of her head as she scanned the aisles for him, then the full flower of her smile as she spotted him and waved. He didn’t wave back — he could barely bob his head and force his lips back over his gums in a paralyzed grin. His shoulders seemed to be sinking into his chest.

Walter hadn’t looked up yet. He was fumbling with a recalcitrant bunch of bananas, a little unsteady on his feet, waiting for the sequel to what Tom had been saying about his wallet. Jessica was halfway down the aisle, caught between the eggplant and summer squash, when she recognized him. Tom saw her face go numb, then suffuse with blood. There was confusion — no, outright panic — in her eyes, and she faltered, nearly stumbling over a pudgy six-year-old from whose mouth a Sugar Daddy protruded like a second tongue. Tom tried to warn her off with his eyes.

And then Walter looked at Tom, and saw that Tom was looking at someone else.

“Jessica!” Tom shouted, trying to inject as much surprise into his tone as he could. “We were — we were just talking about you!”

Walter was rigid. He gripped the cart so hard his knuckles turned white, and he cradled the bananas as if they were alive. Jessica was on them now, awkward, too tall, gangling, her legs and arms naked, the shell top too bright, the cloisonné earrings scorching her ears. “Yeah,” Walter murmured, looking down at the floor and then up into her eyes, “we were. Really.” And then, in an undertone: “Hi.”

“What a coincidence, huh?” Tom yelped, slapping his hands together for emphasis. “God,” he said, “God, you’re looking good, Jessica. Isn’t she, Van?” and he trailed off with a strained laugh.

Jessica had regained her composure. She moved toward Tom, erect and commanding, hair floating at her shoulders, neck arched, mouth set, and slipped an arm around his waist. “We’re living together, Walter,” she said. “Tom and I. Up at the shack.”

In that moment Tom felt as small and mean as a saint ever felt. He watched Walter’s face — the face of his oldest and closest friend — as it struggled for control, and he felt like a liar, a traitor, he felt like a scorpion in a boot. Jessica gripped him tighter. She was leaning into him now with virtually her full weight (which, by latest reckoning, was six pounds greater than his), and he found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to strain toward her to keep from tumbling backward into the onions. She had spoken decisively, bluntly, treading wide of emotion, but now her lower lip was trembling and her eyes were bright with fluid.

Walter’s face had initially registered the shock of seeing her, and then, as she came up to them, he uttered his heavy-lidded and sheepish greeting, with all its conciliatory freight, and he’d looked open, hopeful, truly and ingenuously pleased. Now, as her words sank in, his expression hardened, all the emotion chiseled away, until at last he wore the perfect unassailable mask of the outcast, the cold of eye and hard of heart, the man who feels nothing. He began to say something, but caught himself.