“Well. That was it.” Renée stood up and spanked the seat of her dress. “Where’s your costume?”
“It’s in my pocket,” Louis said. He was wearing a loud tweed jacket over a plaid flannel shirt; from the neck down, he looked Sicilian. “Where’s yours?”
“This is it.”
“You’re in mourning.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Another quantum of wind came whistling down the street and flattened her hair, parting it above her ear. There was something bare about her, something she wasn’t wearing. A purse, Louis thought; but it was more than this. In his car, she pulled slack into her shoulder belt and moved away from him, leaning into the crook between seat and window. She rested her palms on the upholstery to either side of her legs, and it seemed to cost her an effort of will to hold her shoulders back, as if she were fighting the inclination to hunch over and cross her arms across her chest, as if she were in a doctor’s office, sitting naked on the paper-covered table and fighting that inclination. But of course she was fully clothed now. Louis said he’d seen her on TV.
“Oh yeah?” She raised her arm slowly, trying to rest her elbow on top of the bucket seat, but the seat was too high. More slowly yet, she lowered her hand to the cushion again. “Was it awful?”
“You didn’t watch it?”
“I don’t have a TV.”
“What makes you think it was awful?”
“Well, only that this jerk of a reporter started asking me questions about Philip Stites. Which I understand is what they put on the show.”
Her voice, which was strangely bright to begin with, became downright merry at words like “jerk” and “awful.”
“The regular department chairman where I work’s on leave in California, and of the other two seismologists you can talk to, one’s been in the hospital since February and the other’s kind of an amazing person, because he’s never available although he lives right in Cambridge and works all the time. But so when Channel 4 called up to arrange to get the Harvard view of things”—this with a merry stress—“I was the person to be talked to. They obviously had this angle which was going to be science versus religion, only it wasn’t so obvious at the time. Plus I was a woman, so it was a perfect setup. I’d never been in front of a camera before. It just didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to answer. The other seismologists he talked to not only actually know something about New England seismicity (which I don’t) but from what I hear were smart enough not to take the bait on Stites.”
“Somebody has to say these things,” Louis said, piloting the car onto I-93.
“It’s so disgusting. This idea of a single-purpose church, the Church of Hating Women, which typically it’s mostly women who’ve been joining. And they’re all nesting in that slime pit of a building in Chelsea, which as you probably know is kind of a slime pit itself.” She lowered her head and with a pensive sneer followed the movements of other cars changing lanes, eyeing them like enemies. A strong gust of wind made the Civic shy and a line of winter sand slide sideways through the headlight beams.
“I talked to your mother again,” Renée said, as if to change the subject.
Louis concentrated on the road. A pack of headlights had filled the rearview mirror and begun to pass him on the right; the car shied again in the wind. It took Renée a while to realize that he was ignoring what she’d said. Slowly, with one finger, she pulled a dark, pointed tongue of hair off her temple. “I said I talked to your mother again.”
“Yeah, I have no comment.”
“Oh. I see.” She made a face. “She called me, you know.”
“For professional advice.”
“Yes.”
“You should bill her.” He looked over his shoulder, pushing on the brake pedal. There was a car in his right-side blinid spot, cars passing him on the left and swerving in front of him, earn crowding and plunging like lemmings down a curved ramp. He played essentially no part in bringing the Civic through a rotary and onto Storrow Drive.
Renée asked him if he was a student or what. It transpired that she’d actually heard of WSNE and had even, on occasion, listened to it. She said it was like a college station that had gotten lost in the AM band. “That’s us,” he said.
“Do you like living in Boston?”
“I have a neighbor who keeps asking me that. Kind of a pathetic old guy. He’s very concerned about whether I like Somerville. Keeps asking me if I think I’m gonna like it here.”
“What do you tell him?”
“I tell him, Aw fuck you, old man. Ha-ha.”
“Ha-ha.”
“But what about you?” Louis said. “You like it? You like it here in Boston?”
“Sure.” Renée smiled at some hidden irony. “It’s where I always wanted to live. The east coast in general, Boston in particular.”
“This was during your childhood in Waco?”
“My childhood in Chicago. My childhood and adolescence.”
“Where in Chicago?”
“Lake Forest.”
“Ah, Lake Forest, Lake Forest.” The words had a Pavlovian effect on his blood pressure. “That’s where I wanted to live when I was a kid in Evanston. You have one of those places right on the lake?”
“You’re from Evanston?”
“Whether you had one of those places right on the lake, is what I asked.”
“No. We did not.”
“That’s what I call easy livin’. One of those places right on the lake. Did you have a boat?”
Renée crossed her arms and kept her mouth closed. She was clearly not enjoying Louis’s company.
“We were talking about Boston,” he said.
She looked out her window tiredly. It didn’t seem to be sociability that made her go on and say: “Squantum. Mashpee. Peebiddy. Athol. Braintree. Swumpscutt. Quinzee.”
“I’m hearing an issue with the place-names.”
“It’s cheap, I know. But there’s something about the place . . . a coldness, an ugliness. I mean every week there’s some incredibly twisted crime here. And somehow all the people who think Boston’s a center of culture and education manage to ignore it. They see this cute, manageable, safe city, you know, that’s not as scary as New York. It’s like New York, only better. But I look and I see overt racism and a rotten climate and elevated cancer rates and bad drivers and a harbor full of sewage, and I see all these young mothers with their Saabs in Cambridge blissing out on being in Cambridge, and who wouldn’t be revolted?”
Louis was laughing.
“You laugh,” Renée said. “It’s obviously a problem I have. I always wanted to live here. But then I found out that the part of me that made this place attractive, the part of me I shared with the other people who actively wanted to be here, was not a part of me that I liked anymore. And the fact that I’m still here after six years is this ghastly reminder of something about myself I wish I’d forgotten six years ago. I feel so implicated. People come here and soak up the experience for a few years and then they move away to real places, and all their lives they talk about this romantic time they had in a city they were too young to notice wasn’t much, and the whole country buys this image of Boston as a fun town, and what’s sickening is that Boston itself buys it more than anybody. And after six years it’s assumed that I buy it too.”
“Why don’t you get out of here?”
“I am, in September. First I had to get a degree, though.” Louis was looking up at house numbers on a street called Marlborough.
“Besides, I hate the idea of the place more than the place itself. And I don’t hate Somerville at all. Perversely. What’s the number we’re looking for?”
“This one here,” he said, pointing at a brick town house. He had only this moment realized that parking might be a problem. In the next twenty-five minutes he and Renée passed the Peter Stoorhuys residence eight times. Traffic was heavy and abnormal, the cars creeping through the gentrified grid in an inverse cakewalk, everyone waiting fo
r a space to open up. Louis spiraled farther and farther away from Peter’s house. He ignored spaces that seemed too distant, and then when he returned to them with a more informed idea of their value, they were filled. (It was like learning the hard way how to time stock purchases.) He tried backing into spaces that he knew were too small. He slammed on the brakes for hydrants and then floored the gas pedal. He ran red lights. And when, closer to ten o’clock than to nine, he found an empty spot one block from Peter’s house, he was almost too suspicious to take it. Three cars ahead of him had passed it with the blitheness of insiders. There didn’t seem to be a hydrant or a driveway or a resident permit only sign, and the space must just have opened up, but somehow it didn’t seem fresh. He backed in, frowning warily, as a tiger in the forest might if it ran across a raw beef roast on a sheet of waxed paper. His hips were wet with runoff from his armpits.
“Looked like a nice party in there.”
“This sucks. This sucks.”
At the door of the first-floor apartment he put his costume on. It was the dust mask he’d worn in high school for cutting grass in dry weather. It had two protruding snout-like vents that he still had some paper filters for. “That’s very . . . off-putting,” Renée said.
“Thank you.”
Eileen came to the door with a bottle of beer. She had her hair pinned up and was wearing a man’s double-knit plaid suit and a fat pumpkin-colored necktie. Her cheeks were flushed. “Is that you, Louis?” From her tone you might have gathered he was six years old. She smiled tentatively at Renée.
“This is my sister, Eileen,” Louis huffed, pointing at her with his left-side snout. Renée finished the introduction herself, and Eileen turned on a frantic superficiality worthy of a woman twice her age. She hovered by the newcomers, explaining the party and pointing out the available pleasures. Louis noticed that Peter owned a sofa and a coffee table identical to the ones in her apartment. In the high-ceilinged living room, which had the stark soffits and smooth walls of a recent rehab, about half the guests were in costume. The prizewinner was an individual in a Mylar suit complete with a reflector visor, a hard hat, and a pendular air-filtration system that put Louis’s to shame. Surrounding this figure was a group of young men in weekend-wear. From the basking movements of its head it appeared to be receiving their ongoing congratulations. Good friends of hers from school, Eileen explained. Another good friend of hers sat by the stereo equipment with his arm draped over the top component, his fingers on a control knob, his head nodding to the beat of tinny reggae in a major key. His other arm was in a sling. In the center of the room, a herd of young women with execu-clipped hair were raising and lowering their feet in the kind of semiconscious dancing a person does on too-hot sand. Some wore bandages on various body parts; all wore drop-waisted dresses. “What’s your costume?” Louis asked Eileen.
“Can’t you guess?”
“Small businessman with heavy losses.”
She gave him an anguished look. “I’m an insurance adjusterrr-rrr! You see my tape measure, my notepad, my calculator—” She stopped. She looked just like a cat that had suddenly become aware of being watched. She retracted her head a little and her eyes moved back and forth between Louis and Renée, who were standing two feet apart and paying careful attention to her. One thing was she’d never seen her brother with a female escort.
There was an oddly compassionate note in Renée’s voice. “What were you going to say?”
“Nothing, nothing,” Eileen becoming flustered. “Just an adjuster, ’surance injuster. There’s lots and lots of food, so. Help yourself.”
Renée looked on with even more noticeable compassion as Eileen burrowed through the group of dancing women, who two by two glanced over their shoulders at the newcomers. Before they could venture further into the party, an ugly thing happened.
The figure in the Mylar suit was approaching them, doing a lunar-gravity thing. They tried to ignore it, but it stepped between them and peered up through its shiny visor into Louis’s face. He saw a masked, bronze-toned image of unamusement. The figure’s retinue of friends looked on in suspense and delight as it contorted its limbs in elaborate slow motion and peered up into Renée’s face. It touched Louis’s head with kinked rubber fingers. It touched Renée’s ear, robotic squeaks and clicks emerging from its vents. Its friends were cracking up. Louis was afraid Renée was going to joke along with it, be “weird” in return, but she remained stonefaced. When the figure again made so bold as to touch Louis’s head, he caught hold of its wrist and looked down his nose and squeezed through the rubber glove until he heard a squeal of pain inside the headgear.
“Shit!” the figure accused in a muted voice, retreating towards its friends. The friends weren’t laughing anymore. One forty-year-old twenty-two-year-old in green pants detached himself from the group. With terrible, paternal maturity he said to Louis, “We’re dealing with a rented suit here, dude.”
“We’re dealing with an asshole. Dude.”
“Yeah, and I kinda think it’s you.”
Louis smiled inside his mask, pleasantly out of control. “Wooo-ee.”
“Let’s not be stupid,” Renée interposed. “Your man in the suit here started this.”
The enemy had enough control of himself to generalize. “I guess some people can’t take a joke.”
I’m going to kill you, Louis thought. I’m going to smash your fucking nose.
“That’s right,” Renée said sweetly. “We have no sense of humor.”
The enemy looked at Louis, who thrust his head out invitingly. “I’m not going to fight with you,” he said.
Louis understood then that he was losing, had lost, in fact. “Love your pants,” he said futilely as the enemy walked away.
It appeared that Eileen hadn’t seen any of this. She was doing a little dance by one of the stereo speakers, her beer bottle swaying back and forth, her bottom wagging at the rest of the room. It was like a worker bee’s coded dance of good tidings, very self-absorbed and yet very public: significant honeysuckle to the north-northwest. Louis had the thought, as he and Renée passed by the bandaged females, that in her own circle Eileen was probably considered a free and quirky spirit.
“Charming fellow,” Renée said.
Louis lowered his shoulder and bumped her so hard that she had to take a step sideways for balance. She didn’t seem to appreciate this.
The apartment was huge. The only people in the room behind the living room were three extremely pretty girls, three jumbo girls, the kind with long legs and long arms and long hair. (In Homer’s world, a god among strangers could be recognized by its unusual beauty and unusual height.) Renée suddenly began to act as if she didn’t know where she was going; she almost went back into the living room. Evidently it hadn’t escaped her attention that one of the jumbos was in exquisite mourning, an ensemble that included a silk shawl, a pert little hat, and a sheer black veil. The girl looked Renée over with negligible interest and then buried her head in the consultations of her companions, who were methodically taking food from a well-stocked table and putting it in their perfect mouths.
The people in the kitchen were pretty clearly Peter’s friends. Pale nightclub arms were aiming cigarette ashes at various receptacles. Drinks were being raised to urban palimpsest faces—punk-yuppie hybrids, pixyish women in thematic costumes, a tank-topped Homo nautilus with slicked-back hair. Three middle-aged New Englanders with mustaches sat at the table drinking Jack Daniel’s, and Peter himself, in a faded Blondie T-shirt and the billed cap of a Boston city cop, was seated on the rim of the sink. His head had nodded onto his chest.
“Case in point,” he said, raising it with effort, “is my old man’s company, old Sweet-Ass Incorporated.” He glanced at the doorway. Seeing Louis in his dust mask, he rolled his eyes.
Louis blinked innocently. Renée offered him a dripping bottle of Popular Import, which he declined. He was pretty sure the table and chairs here were Eileen’s.
“For fifty
years,” Peter went on, to an apparently appreciative audience, “they’ve been making their little contribution to the GNP and not incidentally doing some very dubious shit indeed to the environment. I could tell you a fact or two that you would not believe, repeat, not believe. And then suddenly it’s the nineties, and that environment which they’d always thought was this nice soft thing they could screw over any way they felt like turns around and does a little damage to their property in Lynn and also keeps the heat on so their stock price falls and they aren’t sure if they really ought to be operating that plant with all its nasty byproducts because what are they gonna do if one day it cracks wide open—” Peter gasped for breath. “And then it’s: Incredible outrage! Mother Nature, dearest Mother Nature dear, what’d we ever do to you to deserve a thing like this? I told my old man, Hey, maybe you had it coming, and he did not take kindly to that point of view. He told me: We are an asset to the Commonwealth. No lie, I’m telling you: an asset to the Commonwealth.”
There were joyful noises in the living room as the reggae gave way to a fifteen-year-old Bruce Springsteen recording. From behind Louis someone asked Peter in a loud, clear voice: “What are you talking about?”
It was Renée. Peter swung his head drunkenly and smiled as if to say, What have we here?
“Sweeting-Aldren,” a woman in a hard hat and a see-through chemise answered for him.
Renée’s mouth formed the word “oh.”
“That’s right,” Peter said. “The company from which all blessings flow. We are blessed with fruits and vegetables that don’t have brown spots. We’re blessed with Warning Orange price stickers, Warning Orange road cones, Warning Orange gym socks. We’re blessed with Asian jungles that don’t have foliage.” He snapped his fingers. “You—what’s your name?”