T. Boyle - World's End

“It’s been so long,” Jessica said, softening. “We — Tom and I — thought about you, wondered how you were coming along”—and here she glanced down at his feet—“and we would have called, really, but I didn’t know how you felt about it, I mean, after that last time in the hospital and all. …” She trailed off, her voice catching in her throat.

Walter was silent. Tom couldn’t look him in the eye; he tried to think about pleasant things, good things, things of the earth. Like his goat, his cabbage, his bees. “You and Tom,” Walter said finally, as if trying out the words for the first time; “you and Tom,” he repeated, and his tone had turned venomous.

Tom could feel Jessica go tense beside him; she shifted her weight suddenly and he had to snatch at the cart to keep his balance. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said, cold fury in her voice. “Tom and me. You have any objections?”

A version of “Love Me Do,” for bicycle horn and chorus, droned through hidden speakers. An elderly man, guiding his cart with the broad beam of his fallen abdomen, maneuvered his way between them and began sifting through the onions as if he were panning for gold. “Hey, Ray!” the manager barked at an invisible stockboy, “get the lead out of your pants, will ya?”

As Tom feared, Walter did have objections. He vented them nonverbally at first, clutching the cart with both hands and hammering it with his invulnerable foot till it shuddered, and then he waxed sarcastic. And rhetorical. “Objections?” he sneered. “Who, me? I’m only your husband — why should I object if you’re fucking my best friend?”

The onion sifter turned to look at them. Tom felt like an interloper. Or worse: he felt like a Lothario, a snake in the grass, and envisioned Walter’s hands at his throat, Walter’s fist in his face, Walter’s hundred and ninety footless pounds hurtling at him over the basket laden with soy grits and rice. Jessica suddenly let go of him, snatching her arm from around his waist and holding up a single searing finger: “You walked out on me,” she said between her teeth, each syllable edged with an inchoate sob.

“You walked out on me,” Walter shot back. Puffed with rage, big as cueballs, his eyes swept from Jessica to Tom and back again.

Out of the corner of his eye, Tom saw the old onion sifter jam his hands to his hips as if to say “Enough, already!” The saint, agitated enough as it was, swiveled his head to give the old fart his fiercest “fuck off” look (which admittedly wasn’t all that fierce), and when he turned back to Jessica she was stamping her feet like a flamenco dancer warming up to the beat, and tears glistened on her face. “I don’t have to take this, this”—her voice went over the top in a breathy squeak—“this shit!”

Walter stepped back then, calmly, gravely, and gave them all — Tom, Jessica, the old man with the bag of onions and the half-dozen housewives who’d lingered over the Swiss chard to eavesdrop — a look of supreme contempt. Then he nodded his head fifteen or twenty times, as if to concede the point, and wobbled out behind his cart, shuffling unsteadily down the aisle till he rounded the corner by the condiments and disappeared.

Jessica didn’t take it lightly. She felt around her for a moment as if she were blind, dabbed a damp wrist to her eyes and bolted for the exit without a word. She was sobbing when Tom, who’d left the cart behind and dashed out after her, reached the car. She sobbed as he drove, sobbed as she pressed the duffel bag crammed with still-wet laundry to her chest and made her way down the steep path from the road, through the pasture, across the footbridge and up the hill to the shack. She sobbed as Tom boiled up the last of the old rice and threw together a Bibb lettuce and zucchini salad from the garden, and she sobbed as they sat in the gathering darkness sharing a forlorn joint and two jelly jars of sour wine.

By nightfall, she’d wound down from a sporadic mewl and whimper to the regular heaving of long, stuttering, world-weary sighs. The saint of the forest was gentle, tender, awkward and clumsy. He clowned for her, joked that she should take salt tabs to replenish that vital mineral she’d extruded by the shaker-full and even (partly by design, partly by accident) fell backward over the porch railing and into the big washtub full of dirty dishwater. This last brought a rueful smile to her lips, and he poured it on, standing on his hands, balancing a broom on his nose and all the rest. She laughed. Her eyes cleared. They went to bed.

The bony saint made love to her that night, a soft, therapeutic love, and he was as careful and tentative in his lovemaking as if it were the first time. After she fell asleep, he lay there beside her in the darkness, the day’s events replaying themselves over and over in his head. He winced when he thought of his own falseness and cowardice, of the role Walter’s sudden appearance had thrust him into, but when he thought of Jessica, he was afraid.

He reached out to touch her, to stroke her sleeping arm, as if to reassure himself she was still there. It was the picture of her disconsolate eyes and tortured mouth, of her runny nose and quaking shoulders, that got him. She wasn’t his, she was Walter’s — why else would she act like that?

Sad to the core, jealous, fearful, the would-be saint lay there in the darkness with his hurt and his regret. They made such a great pair, he and Jessica — into fish, the Hudson, goats and bees and home-pressed cider. They did. Of course they did. And as he thought of all the things they had in common, he began to feel better. Certainly she had feelings for Walter — they’d been through a heavy thing together — but she had feelings for him too. He knew it, and she knew it. They fit together. They were made for each other. Theirs was such a — and the joke sprang into his head like an anodyne, like a cold compress applied to a fresh bruise — such a grand union.

Coolly, methodically, step by scrupulous step, Walter went through the motions of his biweekly trip to the supermarket as if nothing had happened. Was he out of dental floss, or no? Planter’s peanuts? Saltwater taffy? Onions? He deliberated over the pasta — linguine, vermicelli or shells? — tapped the watermelons, rejected the Pancho Villa Authentic Mexican TV dinner (enchilada, rice, beans and salsa verde, with a dollop of baked custard on the side) in favor of the I Ching (egg roll, pork fried rice, Canton strudel and fortune cookie). Never lifting his head, never peering around the corners or gazing up the aisles, he examined each product as if he’d never seen its like before, as if each individual package were a wonder on the order of bleeding statues or extraterrestrial life.

He may have looked cool, but beneath the broad-cut lapels and flared waist of his beige Bertinelli suit, he was seething. And sweating. His armpits were wet — Right Guard, was he out of Right Guard? — water coursed down his back inside the Arrow shirt and pasted it to his skin, his crotch was clammy. As he stood at the checkout stand staring hostilely at the herd of cud-chewing checkout girls, pregnant housewives, yammering children and pimply boxboys, he wanted to scream out, hit something, slam his fist into the counter till the skin opened up to reveal the naked bones of his hand, cracked and white and hurt to the marrow. Tom Crane and Jessica. It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t. They were kidding him — it was a joke, that’s what it was.

He bowed his head and tried to concentrate on a wad of soiled paper balled up beneath the candy display. He counted to twenty. Finally, when he could stand it no longer, he lifted his head and glanced furtively around him. One quick look: to the right, to the left, then face forward and out the window to scan the lot for her car.