T. Boyle - World's End

“No,” Walter murmured, feeling immeasurably weary, vastly drunk, “it’s me, Walter.”

The light fell across her face, the wild teased bush of her hair. She lifted a hand to shield her eyes. “Oh, fuck,” she spat, “shut the door, will you? The top of my head feels like it’s about to lift off.”

Walter stepped inside and shut the door. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, a moment during which the plaint of bass and guitar was amplified by the addition of a muddy quavering vocal track — some guy who sounded as if he were singing through his socks. From the bottom of a sewer. In hell. “Nice music,” Walter said. “Who is it — the guys on the door?”

Mardi didn’t answer. Her cigarette — or no, it was a joint; he could smell it — glowed in the dark.

He started for the bed, thinking to ease himself down on it, maybe take a hit of the joint, help her off with her T-shirt, forget himself for a space. But he didn’t quite make it. Something immovable — the beveled edge of her bureau? — caught him in the groin, and his foot came down hard on something else, something frangible, that gave way with a splintering crack.

Still Mardi said nothing.

“You got a headache?” he said, struggling for balance, bending low to reach for the near corner of the mattress, “is that it?” And then, mercifully, he was sinking into the mattress, off his feet at last and so close to her he could feel the heat of her body, smell her hair, her sweat, the least maddening essence of her secret self.

“I’m waiting for Rick,” she said, and her voice was strange, distant, as if it weren’t really plugged in. “Rick,” she repeated, in a murmur. And then: “I’m stoned, really stoned. I’m tripping. Seeing things. Scary things.”

Walter pondered this revelation for a minute, then confessed that he wasn’t feeling so hot himself. This, he hoped, would be the prelude to some meliorative embraces and consolatory sex, but his hopes were immediately dashed when she sprang up from the bed as if she’d been stung, stalked across the room and flung the door open. Her face was twisted with fury and the cold hard irises of her eyes contracted round the pinpoints of her pupils. “Get out!” she shouted, her voice rising to a shriek with the punch of the adverb.

The term “flipping out” came to him, but he didn’t know whether it properly applied to Mardi or himself. In any case, he got up off the bed with alacrity, envisioning a vindictive Depeyster taking the stairs two at a time to see what his most trusted employee was doing to his half-dressed and hysterical daughter in the darkness of her room. As he staggered toward her, though, all the hurts and dislocations of the day began to fester in him, and he stopped short to demand an explanation along the lines of I thought we were friends and what about last month when we … and then we…?

“No,” she said, trembling in her T-shirt, nipples hard, navel exposed, legs strong and naked and brown, “never again. Not with you.”

They were face to face now, inches apart. He looked down at her: a tic had invaded the right side of her face, her lips were parted and dry. All of a sudden he was seized with an urge to choke her, throttle her, knead that perfect throat till all the tightness went out of it, till she dropped from his hands limp as a fish slapped against the gunwale. But in the same instant she shouted “You’re just like him!” and the accusation caught him off balance.

“Like who?” he sputtered, wondering what she was talking about, how he’d managed to put his foot in it in the space of two minutes, and even, for a second there, wondering who he was. He watched her closely, drunk but wary. She was swaying on her feet. He was swaying on his feet. Her breath was hot in his face.

“My father!” she shrieked, lunging into him to pound her balled hands on the drum of his chest. He tried to snatch at her wrists, but she was too quick for him. “Look at you,” she snarled, pushing away from him so violently he nearly lurched backward over the railing and plunged to the unforgiving peg-and-groove floor below. “Look at you, in your faggoty suit and fucking crew cut — what do you think you are, some kind of Shriner or something?”

“Mardi?” Depeyster’s voice echoed from the rear of the house. “That you?”

She stood poised in the doorway, drilling Walter with a look that tore through the last tattered rags of his self-esteem. “I’ll tell you what you are,” she said, lowering her voice as a bull lowers its horns for goring, “you’re a fascist just like him. A fascist,” she repeated, lingering over the hiss of it as if she were Adam discovering the names of things — fink, pig, narc, fascist — and slammed the door for punctuation.

Terrific, Walter thought, standing there in the empty hallway. He was footless, fatherless, loveless, his wife was living with his best friend and the woman he’d left her for probably felt better about Mussolini than she did about him. And on top of it all, he was sick to his stomach, his head ached and he’d nearly ripped the bumper off his car. What next?

Walter braced himself against the banister and turned to peer down the well of the staircase. Below him, at the foot of the stairs, in an old pair of chinos and a faded blue shirt that brought out the color in his eyes, stood Depeyster Van Wart — Dipe — his boss and mentor. Depeyster was working something in his hands — a harness or bridle, it looked like — and he wore a puzzled expression. “Walter?” he said.

Walter started down the stairs. He was forcing a smile, though the muscles of his face seemed dead and he felt as if he were either going to pass out cold or break down and sob — hard, soulless and free though he may have been. All things considered, he did pretty well. When he reached the last step, leering like a child molester, he held out his hand and boomed “Hi, Dipe,” as if he were greeting him from the far side of Yankee Stadium.

They stood a moment at the foot of the stairs, Walter losing all control of his face, the lord of the manor dropping the bridle — yes, bridle it was — to lift a hand and scratch the back of his head. “Did I hear Mardi?” he asked.

“Uh-huh,” Walter said, but before he could enlarge on this curt and wholly inadequate reply, Depeyster cut him off with a low whistle. “Jesus,” he said, “you look like hell, you know that?”

Later, over successive cups of coffee in the ancient cavernous kitchen that gleamed with the anachronisms of dishwasher, toaster, refrigerator and oven, Walter experienced the release of confession. He told Depeyster of Jessica and Tom, of his hallucination on the road, the defeat in his heart and his crazy confrontation with Mardi. Hunched over the bridle with a rag soaked in neat’s-foot oil, Depeyster listened, glancing up from time to time, his aristocratic features composed, priestly, supremely disinterested. He offered the encouragement of the occasional interrogatory grunt or interjection, heard him out and chose sides without hesitation. “I hate to say it, Walter”—he spoke in clean, clipped, incisive tones—“but your wife sounds like she’s gone off the deep end. I mean, what can you expect from a woman who could move into a shack that hasn’t even got electricity, let alone running water — and with a doped-up screwball like that Crane kid, yet. Is that stable or what?”

No, of course it wasn’t. It was irrational, stupid, a mistake. Walter shrugged.

“You made a mistake, Walter, forget it. We all make mistakes. And as for Mardi — well, maybe that’s for the best too.” Depeyster gave him a long look. “I admit it, Walter, I hoped that maybe you and her, well. …” He broke off with a sigh. “I hate to say this about my own daughter, but you’re worth ten of her.”