T.C. Boyle Stories II: Volume II Page 12

  And what did her room smell like? Like an animal’s den, like a burrow or a hive. And female. Intensely female. I glanced at the pile of brassieres, panties, body stockings and sweatsocks in the corner, and she lit a joss stick, pulled the curtains and put on a CD by a band I don’t want to name here, but which I like—there was no problem with her taste or anything like that. Or so I thought.

  She straightened up from bending over the CD player and turned to me in the half-light of the curtained room and said, “You like this band?”

  We were standing there like strangers amidst the intensely personal detritus of her room, awkward and insecure. I didn’t know her. I’d never been there before. And I must have seemed like some weird growth sprung up on the unsuspecting flank of her personal space. “Yeah,” I said, “they’re hot,” and I was going to expand on that with some technical praise, just to let her see how hip and knowing I was, when she threw out a sigh and let her arms fall to her sides.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “what I really like is soul and gospel—especially gospel. I put this on for you.”

  I felt deflated suddenly, unhip and uncool. There she was, joss stick sweetening the air, her hair a world of its own, my father’s fan—my absent famous self-absorbed son of a bitch of a father actually pimping for me—and I didn’t know what to say. After an awkward pause, the familiar band slamming down their chords and yowling out their shopworn angst, I said, “Let’s hear some of your stuff then.”

  She looked pleased, her too-small mouth pushed up into something resembling a smile, and then she stepped forward and enveloped me in her hair. We kissed. She kissed me, actually, and I responded, and then she bounced the two steps to the CD player and put on Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters, a slow thump of tinny drums and an organ that sounded like something fresh out of the muffler shop, followed by a high-pitched blur of semihysterical voices. “Like it?” she said.

  What could I say? “It’s different,” I said.

  She assured me it would grow on me, like anything else, if I gave it half a chance, ran down the other band for their pedestrian posturing, and invited me to get into her bed. “But don’t take off your clothes,” she said, “not yet.”

  I had a three o’clock class in psychology, the first meeting of the semester, and I suspected I was going to miss it. I was right. Victoria made a real ritual of the whole thing, clothes coming off with the masturbatory dalliance of a strip show, the covers rolling back periodically to show this patch of flesh or that, strategically revealed. I discovered her breasts one at a time, admired the tattoo on her ankle (a backward S that proved, according to her, that she was a reincarnated Norse skald), and saw that she really was a redhead in the conventional sense. Her lips were dry, her tongue was unstoppable, her hair a primal encounter. When we were done, she sat up and I saw that her breasts pointed in two different directions, and that was human in a way I can’t really express, a very personal thing, as if she was letting me in on a secret that was more intimate than the sex itself. I was touched. I admit it. I looked at those mismatched breasts and they meant more to me than her lips and her eyes and the deep thrumming instrument of her voice, if you know what I mean.

  “So,” she said, sipping from a mug of water she produced from somewhere among a stack of books and papers scattered beside the mattress, “what do I call you? I mean, Achates—right?—that’s a real mouthful.”

  “That’s my father,” I said. “One of his bullshit affectations—how could the great one have a kid called Joe or Evan or Jim-Bob or Dickie?” My head was on the pillow, my eyes were on the ceiling. “You know what my name means? It means ‘faithful companion,’ can you believe that?”

  She was silent a moment, her gray eyes locked on me over the lip of the cup, her breasts dimpling with the cold. “Yeah,” she said, “I can see what you mean,” and she pulled the covers up to her throat. “But what do people call you?”

  I stared bleakly across the room, fastening on nothing, and when I exhaled I could see my breath. Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters were still at it, punishing the rhythm section and charging after the vocals till you’d think somebody had set their dresses on fire. “My father calls me Ake,” I said finally, “or at least he used to when I used to know him. And in case you’re wondering how you spell that, that’s Ake with a k.”

  —

  Victoria dropped out of the blond poet-novelist’s lit class, but I knew where she lived and you couldn’t miss her hair jogging across the tundra. I saw her maybe two or three times a week, especially on weekends. When things began to get to me—life, exams, too many shooters of Jack or tequila, my mother’s zombielike voice on the telephone—I sank into the den of Victoria’s room with its animal funk and shrinking walls as if I’d never climb back out, and it was nothing like the cold, dry burrow I thought of when I thought of my father. Just the opposite: Victoria’s room, with Victoria in it, was positively tropical, whether you could see your breath or not. I even began to develop a tolerance for the Angeline Sisters.

  I avoided class the day we dissected the McNeil canon, but I was there for Delmore Schwartz and his amazing re-creation of his parents’ courtship unfolding on a movie screen in his head. In dreams begin responsibilities—yes, sure, but whose responsibility was I? And how long would I have to wait before we got to the sequel and my dreams? I’d looked through the photo albums, my mother an open-faced hippie in cutoffs and serape with her seamless blond hair and Slavic cheekbones and my father cocky and staring into the lens out of the shining halo of his hair, everything a performance, even a simple photograph, even then. The sperm and the egg, that was a biological concept, that was something I could envision up there on the big screen, the wriggling clot of life, the wet glowing ball of the egg, but picturing them coming together, his coldness, his arrogance, his total absorption in himself, that was beyond me. Chalk it up to reticence. To DNA. To the grandiosity of the patriarchal cock. But then he was me and I was him and how else could you account for it?

  It was Victoria who called my attention to the poster. The posters, that is, about six million of them plastered all over every stationary object within a two-mile orbit of the campus as if he was a rock star or something, as if he really counted for anything, as if anybody could even read anymore let alone give half a shit about a balding, leather-jacketed, ex-hippie wordmeister who worried about his image first, his groin second, and nothing else after that. How did I miss it? A nearsighted dwarf couldn’t have missed it—in fact, all the nearsighted dwarves on campus had already seen it and were lining up with everybody even vaguely ambulatory for their $2.50 Student Activities Board–sponsored tickets:

  TIM McNEIL

  READING FROM ELECTRONIC

  ORPHANS & BLOOD TIES

  FEB. 28, 8:00 P.M.

  DUBOFSKY HALL

  Victoria was right there with me, out front of the Student Union, the poster with his mugshot of a photo staring out at me from behind the double-insulated glass panel that reflected the whole dead Arctic world and me in the middle of it, and we had to dance on our toes and do aerobics for a full two minutes there to stave off hypothermia while I let the full meaning of it sink in. My first response was outrage, and so was my second. I bundled Victoria through the door and out of the blast of the cold, intimately involved in the revolution of her hair, the smell of her gray bristling fake fur coat that looked like half a dozen opossums dropped on her from high, even the feel of her breasts beneath all that wintry armament, and I howled in protest.

  “How in Christ’s name could he do this to me?” I shouted across the echoing entranceway, pink-nosed idiots in their hooded parkas coming and going, giving me their eat-shit-and-die looks. I was furious, out of control. Victoria snatched at my arm to calm me, but I tore away from her.

  “He planned this, you know. He had to. He couldn’t leave well enough alone, couldn’t let me get away from him and be just pla
in nobody up here among the cowflops in this podunk excuse for a university—no, it’s not Harvard, it’s not Stanford, but at least I didn’t take a nickel of his money for it. You think he’d ever even consider reading here even if the Board of Regents got down and licked his armpits and bought him a new Porsche and promised him all the coeds in Burge to fuck one by one till they dropped dead from the sheer joy of it?”

  Victoria just stood there looking at me out of her flat gray eyes, rocking back and forth on the heels of her red leather boots with the cowgirl filigree. We were blocking the doors and people were tramping in and out, passing between us, a trail of yellow slush dribbling behind them in either direction. “I don’t know,” Victoria said over the heads of two Asian girls wrapped up like corpses, “I think it’s kind of cool.”

  A day later, the letter came. Personalized stationery, California address. I tore it open in the hallway outside the door of my overheated, overlit, third-floor room in the sad-smelling old dorm:

  Querido Ake:

  I know it’s been a while but my crazy life just gets crazier what with the European tour for Orphans and Judy and Josh, but I want to make it up to you however I can. I asked Jules to get me the gig at Acadia purposely to give me an excuse to see how you’re getting along. Let’s do dinner or something afterward—bring one of your girlfriends along. We’ll do it up. We will.

  Mucho,

  Dad

  This hit me like a body blow in the late rounds of a prizefight. I was already staggering, bloodied from a hundred hooks and jabs, ten to one against making it to the bell, and now this. Boom. I sat down on my institutional bed and read the thing over twice. Judy was his new wife, and Josh, six months old and still shitting in his pants, was my new brother. Half brother. DNA rules. Shit, it would have been funny if he was dead and I was dead and the whole world a burned-out cinder floating in the dead-black hole of the universe. But I wasn’t dead, and didn’t want to be, not yet at least. The next best thing was being drunk, and that was easy to accomplish. Three Happy Hours and a good lip-splitting, sideburn-thumping altercation with some mountainous asshole in a pair of Revo shades later, and I was ready for him.

  —

  You probably expect me to report that my father, the genius, blew into town and fucked my lit professor, Victoria, the cafeteria ladies and two or three dogs he stumbled across on the way to the reading, but that’s not the way it fell out. Not at all. In fact, he was kind of sorry and subdued and old-looking. Real old-looking, though by my count he must have been fifty-three or maybe fifty-four. It was as if his whole head had collapsed like a rotten jack-o’-lantern, his eyes sucked down these volcanoes of wrinkles, his hair standing straight up on his head like a used toilet brush. But I’m getting ahead of myself. According to my roommate, Jeff Heymann, he’d called about a hundred times and finally left a message saying he was coming in early and wanted to have lunch too, if that was okay with me. It wasn’t okay. I stayed away from the telephone, and I stayed away from my room. In fact, I didn’t even go near the campus for fear of running into him as he long-legged his way across the quad, entourage in tow. I blew off my classes and sank into Victoria’s nest as if it was an opium den, sleep and forgetfulness, Berna Berne and the Angeline Sisters keeping me company, along with a bottle of Don Q Victoria’s dad had brought back from Puerto Rico for her. What was my plan? To crash and burn. To get so fucked up I’d be in a demi-coma till the lunch was eaten, the reading read and dinner forgotten. I mean, fuck him. Really.

  The fatal flaw in my plan was Victoria.

  She didn’t stay there to comfort me with her hair, her neat little zipper of a mouth and her mismatched breasts. No, she went to class, very big day, exams and papers and quizzes. So she said. But do I have to tell you where she really was? Can’t you picture it? The fan, the diehard, somebody who supposedly cared about me, and there she was, camped outside his hotel in the Arctic wind with the snot crusted round her nose ring. They wouldn’t tell her what room he was in, and when she took exception to the attitude of the girl behind the desk, they told her she’d have to wait outside—on the public sidewalk. While she was waiting and freezing and I was attempting to drink myself comatose, he was making phone calls. Another hundred to my room and then to the registrar and the dean and anybody else who might have had a glimmer of my whereabouts, and of course they all fell over dead and contacted my professors, the local police—Christ, probably even the FBI, the CIA and TRW.

  And then it was lunchtime and all the cheeses and honchos from the English Department wanted to break bread with him, so out the door he went, not with Judy on his arm or some more casual acquaintance who might have been last night’s groin massager or the flight attendant who’d served him his breakfast, but his biographer. His biographer. Arm in arm with this bald guy half his height and a face depleted by a pair of glasses the size of the ones Elton John used to wear onstage, trailing dignitaries and toadies, and who does he run into?

  Ten minutes later he’s coming up the stairs at Victoria’s place, and beneath the wailing of the Sisters and the thump of the organ I can hear his footsteps, his and nobody else’s, and I know this: after all these years my father has come for me.

  —

  Lunch was at the Bistro, one of the few places in town that aspired to anything more than pizza, burgers and burritos. My father sat at the head of the table, of course, and I, three-quarters drunk on white rum, sat at his right hand. Victoria was next to me, her expression rapt, her hair snaking out behind me in the direction of the great man like the tendrils of some unkillable plant, and the biographer, sunk behind his glasses, hunched beside her with a little black notepad. The rest of the table, from my father’s side down, was occupied by various members of the English Department I vaguely recognized and older lawyer types who must have been deans or whatever. There was an awkward moment when Dr. Delpino, my American Lit professor, came in, but her eyes, after registering the initial surprise and recalculating our entire relationship from the first day’s roll call on, showed nothing but a sort of fawning, shimmering awe. And how did I feel about that? Sick. Just plain sick.

  I drank desperate cups of black coffee and tried to detoxify myself with something called Coquilles Saint Jacques, which amounted to an indefinable rubbery substance sealed in an impenetrable layer of baked cheese. My father held forth, witty, charming, as pleased with himself as anybody alive. He said things like “I’m glad you’re asking me to speak on the only subject I’m an authority on—me,” and with every other breath he dropped the names of the big impressive actors who’d starred in the big impressive movie version of his last book. “Well,” he’d say, “as far as that goes, Meryl once told me . . . ,” or, “When we were on location in Barbados, Brad and Geena and I used to go snorkeling practically every afternoon, and then it was conch ceviche and this rum drink they call Mata-Mata, after the turtle, and believe me, kill you it does. . . .”

  Add to this the fact that he kept throwing his arm round the back of my chair (and so, my shoulders) as if I’d been there with him through every scintillating tête-à-tête and sexual and literary score, and you might begin to appreciate how I felt. But what could I do? He was playing a role that would have put to shame any of the big-gun actors he named, and I was playing my role too, and though I was seething inside, though I felt betrayed by Victoria and him and all the stupid noshing doglike faces fawning round the table, I played the dutiful and proud son to Academy Award proportions. Or maybe I wasn’t so great. At least I didn’t jump up and flip the table over and call him a fraud, a cheat and a philanderer who had no right to call anybody his son, let alone me. But oh, how those deans and professors sidled up to me afterward to thoroughly kiss my ass while Dr. Delpino glowed over our little secret and tried to shoulder Victoria out of the way. And Victoria. That was another thing. Victoria didn’t seem to recall that I was still alive, so enthralled was she by the overblown spectacle of my father the genius.


  He took me aside just before we stepped back out into the blast of the wind, confidential and fatherly, the others peeling back momentarily in deference to the ties of the blood, and asked me if I was all right. “Are you all right?” he said.

  Everything was in a stir, crescendoing voices, the merry ritual of the zippers, the gloves, the scarves and parkas, a string quartet keening through the speakers in some weird key that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. “What do you mean?” I said.

  I looked into his face then, and the oldness dropped away from him: he was my pal, my dad, the quick-blooded figure I remembered from the kitchen, den and bedroom of my youth. “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “Victoria said—that’s her name, right, Victoria?”

  I nodded.

  “She said you were feeling sick, the flu or something,” and he let it trail off. Somebody shouted, “You should have seen it in December!” and the string quartet choked off in an insectlike murmur of busy strings and nervous fingers. “Cute kid, Victoria,” he said. “She’s something.” And then a stab at a joke: “Guess you inherited my taste, huh?”

  But the dutiful son didn’t smile, let alone laugh. He was feeling less like Achates than Oedipus.

  “You need any money?” my father said, and he was reaching into the pocket of his jeans, an automatic gesture, when the rest of the group converged on us and the question fell dead. He threw an arm round me suddenly and managed to snag Victoria and the proud flag of her hair in the other. He gave a two-way squeeze with his skinny arms and said, “See you at the reading tonight, right?”

  Everyone was watching, right on down to the busboys, not to mention the biographer, Dr. Delpino and all the by-now stunned, awed and grinning strangers squinting up from their coquilles and fritures. It was a real biographical moment. “Yeah,” I said, and I thought for a minute they were going to break into applause, “sure.”