T. C. Boyle Stories Read online

  Praise for T.C. Boyle Stories

  “Who else of Boyle’s generation could have assembled, by this point, a collected stories the size of the Phoenix phone book? Boyle has S.J. Perleman’s affection for the absurdities of pop culture as starting point, Richard Coover’s wicked sense of the flimsiness of our received cultural representations of goodness and evil, Donald Barthelme’s gift for deadpan comic premises…. The fact that I’ve just negotiated [its] seven hundred pages and I’m not sick to death of it attests to its overall inventiveness, flash, and just plain entertainment value.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A great fat book, by a youngish writer making his claim to Maestro status … reveal[s] a writer born to elegance and equipped with keen eyes, ears, and a preternatural skill at evoking the objects of his roving interest.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Varied, clever, and delightful … Boyle has a reputation for wit, which is evident, along with his versatility, in these tales … these stories are consistent in their readability and quality.”

  —The Chicago Tribune

  “T.C. Boyle Stories gives ample evidence of Boyle’s encyclopedic range … there are few authors who could master half as many settings … this often delicious collection confirms the success of Boyle’s prodigious effort to resuscitate the comic tale.”

  —New York Newsday

  “Each [story hops] with manic energy … at his vaulting, imaginative best Boyle suggests the bastard child of Flannery O’Connor and Monty Python.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Boyle has utterly seduced me with his short stories … there’s enough variety here to fill a five and dime, and enough pathos, irony, sardonicism, cleverness, humor (both good and ill), passion and despair to fuel a schizophrenic … furthermore, Boyle clearly wants to have fun with these pieces…. Boyle’s more of a John Cheever: sharp, precise, masterful … no other writer I can think of has such a good time with this format.”

  —Men’s Journal

  “Boyle is an essential writer of our times … there is much to be admired: lively prose, a wicked sense of humor, an erudite intelligence, informed cultural perception.”

  —The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

  “The fantastically creative but contradicted Boyle is at play here, toying with littleness and bigness the same way he does in his offbeat, funny and ‘deadly serious’ (his phrase) novels and short works…. Boyle can be as contrary, satirical, and emotionally crushing in a few pages as he is in four hundred.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “A kind of bulging grab bag into which you can reach for a variety of treats—high spirited, bitter, savage, melancholy or howlingly funny … he is an exuberant writer, a precise and sometimes lyrical stylist … his curiosity appears almost boundless … a timely reminder of the range and talent of one of America’s best writers.”

  —The Rocky Mountain News

  “A generous feast of fiction that is never less than interesting.”

  —The Boston Herald

  “Boyle’s wide-ranging stories defy the usual categories.”

  —The Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Reading T.C. Boyle Stories—a whopping, almost seven hundred page gathering of sixty-eight pieces—feels like spending the liveliest, longest week of one’s life with scores of familiar people you know are cripples by various forms of what Boyle terms ‘aggregation disorder’ … most of Boyle’s stories also stand as prescient vivisections of larger phenomena that result from motives confused by promises of easy gains and quiet corruptions…. Hyperactively personable, dolorous, wickedly funny and written in an accessible style that conflates Cheever, O’Connor, Hiaasen and some ghosts of Richard Brautigan, the collection will transport you through American cities and suburbs.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “In this nearly seven hundred-page collection, whose sixty-nine stories include a few never before published, Boyle comes across as a level-headed literary extremist. As a writer he’s attracted to extremes, geographical and existential. But as a conspicuously sane ironist, he’s also devastatingly skeptical of those extremes.”

  —New York Daily News

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  T.C. BOYLE STORIES

  T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of Drop City, A Friend of the Earth, Riven Rock, The Tortilla Curtain, The Road to Wellville, East Is East, World’s End (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award), Budding Prospects, Water Music, and six collections of stories. In 1999, he was the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. His stories appear regularly in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, and Playboy. He lives near Santa Barbara, California. T.C. Boyle’s Web site is www.tcboyle.com.

  Also by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Novels

  Drop City

  A Friend of the Earth

  Riven Rock

  The Tortilla Curtain

  The Road to Wellville

  East Is East

  World’s End

  Budding Prospects

  Water Music

  Short Story Collections

  Without a Hero

  If the River Was Whiskey

  Greasy Lake

  Descent of Man

  T. C. BOYLE

  STORIES

  THE COLLECTED STORIES OF

  T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1998

  Published in Penguin Books 1999

  7 9 10 8

  Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1998

  All rights reserved

  Page 692 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CIP data available.

  EISBN: 9781101573884

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Life

  Designed by Betty Lew

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  For the editors:

  Bill Buford, Dan Halpern, Lewis Lapham,

  Gordon Lish, Charles McGrath, George Plimpton,

  Alice K. Turner and Robley Wilson, Jr.

  “Reflexes got the better of me.”

  —Bob Marley, “I Shot the Sheriff”

  CONTENTS

  I Love

  Modern Love Ike and Nina Sorry Fugu Without a Hero Heart of a Champion Carnal Knowledge Acts of God Hopes Ris
e Descent of Man Caviar All Shook Up I Dated Jane Austen Caye Little Fur People John Barleycorn Lives The Hat Whales Weep A Women’s Restaurant Thawing Out Back in the Eocene Sitting on Top of the World If the River Was Whiskey Juliana Cloth

  II Death

  Big Game Greasy Lake Peace of Mind King Bee Sinking House The Devil and Irv Cherniske The Human Fly On for the Long Haul The 100 Faces of Death, Volume IV Little America Stones in My Passway, Hellhound on My Trail The Hit Man Not a Leg to Stand On Green Hell Me Cago en la Leche (Robert Jordan in Nicaragua) The Ape Lady in Retirement De Rerum Natura The Extinction Tales The Fog Man Drowning Rara Avis The Overcoat II Mexico

  III And Everything in Between

  Beat Hard Sell The Miracle at Ballinspittle Top of the Food Chain The Hector Quesadilla Story We Are Norsemen The Champ Bloodfall Rupert Beersley and the Beggar Master of Sivani-Hoota The New Moon Party The Second Swimming Dada Two Ships The Little Chill A Bird in Hand The Arctic Explorer Rapture of the Deep 56-0 The Big Garage Zapatos Respect Filthy with Things

  I

  Love

  MODERN LOVE

  There was no exchange of body fluids on the first date, and that suited both of us just fine. I picked her up at seven, took her to Mee Grop, where she meticulously separated each sliver of meat from her Phat Thai, watched her down four bottles of Singha at three dollars per, and then gently stroked her balsam-smelling hair while she snoozed through The Terminator at the Circle Shopping Center theater. We had a late-night drink at Rigoletto’s Pizza Bar (and two slices, plain cheese), and I dropped her off. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.

  “It’s been fun,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, taking her hand.

  She was wearing gloves.

  “I’ll call you,” she said.

  “Good,” I said, giving her my richest smile. “And I’ll call you.”

  On the second date we got acquainted.

  “I can’t tell you what a strain it was for me the other night,” she said, staring down into her chocolate-mocha-fudge sundae. It was early afternoon, we were in Helmut’s Olde Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in Mamaroneck, and the sun streamed through the thick frosted windows and lit the place like a convalescent home. The fixtures glowed behind the counter, the brass rail was buffed to a reflective sheen, and everything smelled of disinfectant. We were the only people in the place.

  “What do you mean?” I said, my mouth glutinous with melted marshmallow and caramel.

  “I mean Thai food, the seats in the movie theater, the ladies’ room in that place for god’s sake …”

  “Thai food?” I wasn’t following her. I recalled the maneuver with the strips of pork and the fastidious dissection of the glass noodles. “You’re a vegetarian?”

  She looked away in exasperation, and then gave me the full, wide-eyed shock of her ice-blue eyes. “Have you seen the Health Department statistics on sanitary conditions in ethnic restaurants?”

  I hadn’t.

  Her eyebrows leapt up. She was earnest. She was lecturing. “These people are refugees. They have—well, different standards. They haven’t even been inoculated.” I watched her dig the tiny spoon into the recesses of the dish and part her lips for a neat, foursquare morsel of ice cream and fudge.

  “The illegals, anyway. And that’s half of them.” She swallowed with an almost imperceptible movement, a shudder, her throat dipping and rising like a gazelle’s. “I got drunk from fear,” she said. “Blind panic. I couldn’t help thinking I’d wind up with hepatitis or dysentery or dengue fever or something.”

  “Dengue fever?”

  “I usually bring a disposable sanitary sheet for public theaters—just think of who might have been in that seat before you, and how many times, and what sort of nasty festering little cultures of this and that there must be in all those ancient dribbles of taffy and Coke and extra-butter popcorn—but I didn’t want you to think I was too extreme or anything on the first date, so I didn’t. And then the ladies’ room … You don’t think I’m overreacting, do you?”

  As a matter of fact, I did. Of course I did. I liked Thai food—and sushi and ginger crab and greasy souvlaki at the corner stand too. There was the look of the mad saint in her eye, the obsessive, the mortifier of the flesh, but I didn’t care. She was lovely, wilting, clear-eyed, and pure, as cool and matchless as if she’d stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and I was in love. Besides, I tended a little that way myself. Hypochondria. Anal retentiveness. The ordered environment and alphabetized books. I was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, I carried some scars and I read the newspapers—herpes, AIDS, the Asian clap that foiled every antibiotic in the book. I was willing to take it slow. “No,” I said, “I don’t think you’re overreacting at all.”

  I paused to draw in a breath so deep it might have been a sigh. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, giving her a doglike look of contrition. “I didn’t know.”

  She reached out then and touched my hand—touched it, skin to skin—and murmured that it was all right, she’d been through worse. “If you want to know,” she breathed, “I like places like this.”

  I glanced around. The place was still empty, but for Helmut, in a blinding white jumpsuit and toque, studiously polishing the tile walls. “I know what you mean,” I said.

  We dated for a month—museums, drives in the country, French and German restaurants, ice-cream emporia, fern bars—before we kissed. And when we kissed, after a showing of David and Lisa at a revival house all the way up in Rhinebeck and on a night so cold no run-of-the-mill bacterium or commonplace virus could have survived it, it was the merest brushing of the lips. She was wearing a big-shouldered coat of synthetic fur and a knit hat pulled down over her brow and she hugged my arm as we stepped out of the theater and into the blast of the night. “God,” she said, “did you see him when he screamed ‘You touched me!’? Wasn’t that priceless?” Her eyes were big and she seemed weirdly excited. “Sure,” I said, “yeah, it was great,” and then she pulled me close and kissed me. I felt the soft flicker of her lips against mine. “I love you,” she said, “I think.”

  A month of dating and one dry fluttering kiss. At this point you might begin to wonder about me, but really, I didn’t mind. As I say, I was willing to wait—I had the patience of Sisyphus—and it was enough just to be with her. Why rush things? I thought. This is good, this is charming, like the slow sweet unfolding of the romance in a Frank Capra movie, where sweetness and light always prevail. Sure, she had her idiosyncrasies, but who didn’t? Frankly, I’d never been comfortable with the three-drinks-dinner-and-bed sort of thing, the girls who come on like they’ve been in prison for six years and just got out in time to put on their makeup and jump into the passenger seat of your car. Breda—that was her name, Breda Drumhill, and the very sound and syllabification of it made me melt—was different.

  Finally, two weeks after the trek to Rhinebeck, she invited me to her apartment. Cocktails, she said. Dinner. A quiet evening in front of the tube.

  She lived in Croton, on the ground floor of a restored Victorian, half a mile from the Harmon station, where she caught the train each morning for Manhattan and her job as an editor of Anthropology Today. She’d held the job since graduating from Barnard six years earlier (with a double major in Rhetoric and Alien Cultures), and it suited her temperament perfectly. Field anthropologists living among the River Dyak of Borneo or the Kurds of Kurdistan would send her rough and grammatically tortured accounts of their observations and she would whip them into shape for popular consumption. Naturally, filth and exotic disease, as well as outlandish customs and revolting habits, played a leading role in her rewrites. Every other day or so she’d call me from work and in a voice that could barely contain its joy give me the details of some new and horrific disease she’d discovered.

  She met me at the door in a silk kimono that featured a plunging neckline an
d a pair of dragons with intertwined tails. Her hair was pinned up as if she’d just stepped out of the bath and she smelled of Noxzema and pHisoHex. She pecked my cheek, took the bottle of Vouvray I held out in offering, and led me into the front room. “Chagas’ disease,” she said, grinning wide to show off her perfect, outsized teeth.

  “Chagas’ disease?” I echoed, not quite knowing what to do with myself. The room was as spare as a monk’s cell. Two chairs, a loveseat, and a coffee table, in glass, chrome, and hard black plastic. No plants (“God knows what sort of insects might live on them—and the dirt, the dirt has got to be crawling with bacteria, not to mention spiders and worms and things”) and no rug (“A breeding ground for fleas and ticks and chiggers”).

  Still grinning, she steered me to the hard black plastic loveseat and sat down beside me, the Vouvray cradled in her lap. “South America,” she whispered, her eyes leaping with excitement. “In the jungle. These bugs—assassin bugs, they’re called—isn’t that wild? These bugs bite you and then, after they’ve sucked on you a while, they go potty next to the wound. When you scratch, it gets into your bloodstream, and anywhere from one to twenty years later you get a disease that’s like a cross between malaria and AIDS.”

  “And then you die,” I said.

  “And then you die.”

  Her voice had turned somber. She wasn’t grinning any longer. What could I say? I patted her hand and flashed a smile. “Yum,” I said, mugging for her.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  She served a cold cream-of-tofu-carrot soup and little lentil-paste sandwiches for an appetizer and a garlic soufflé with biologically controlled vegetables for the entree. Then it was snifters of cognac, the big-screen TV, and a movie called The Boy in the Bubble, about a kid raised in a totally antiseptic environment because he was born without an immune system. No one could touch him. Even the slightest sneeze would have killed him. Breda sniffled through the first half-hour, then pressed my hand and sobbed openly as the boy finally crawled out of the bubble, caught about thirty-seven different diseases, and died before the commercial break. “I’ve seen this movie six times now,” she said, fighting to control her voice, “and it gets to me every time. What a life,” she said, waving her snifter at the screen, “what a perfect life. Don’t you envy him?”