If the River Was Whiskey: Stories Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY

  T. C. Boyle is the author of the novels The Inner Circle, 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, and Water Music. His short story collections include Descent of Man, Greasy Lake, If the River Was Whiskey, Without a Hero, and T. C. Boyle Stories. His short fiction regularly appears in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Playboy, Esquire, and The Atlantic Monthly. Boyle was the recipient of the 1999 PEN/Malamud Award for Elence in Short Fiction. He lives near Santa Barbara, California. T. C. Boyle’s Web site is www.tcboyle.com.

  I F T H E R I V E R

  W A S W H I S K E Y

  S T O R I E S B Y

  T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

  P E N G U I N B O O K S

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by

  Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1989

  Published in Penguin Books 1990

  Copyright © T. Coraghessan Boyle, 1989

  All rights reserved

  Acknowledgment is made to the following, in whose pages these stories first appeared: The Atlantic, “Sinking House”; Antaeus, “The Hat”; The Antioch Review, “The Devil and Irv Cherniske”; Gentleman’s Quarterly, “If the River Was Whiskey” and “Thawing Out”; Granta, “The Miracle at Ballinspittle”; Harper’s, “Hard Sell,” “Peace of Mind,” “Sorry Fugu,” and “Zapatos”; Interview, “Me Cago en la Leche (Robert Jordan in Nicaragua)”; The Paris Review, “The Ape Lady in Retirement”; PEN Syndicated Fiction Project, “The Little Chill”; and Playboy, “The Human Fly,” “King Bee,” and “Modern Love.”

  “Sinking House” also appeared in Prize Stories, The O. Henry Awards, 1989, Edited by William Abrahams.

  Excerpt from “King Bee” by Slim Harpo reprinted by permission of Excellorec Music.

  LIBRARY Of CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Boyle, T. Coraghessan.

  If the river was whiskey: stories/by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

  p. cm.

  “First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin…

  1989”—T.p. verso.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65102-5

  I. Title. II. Series.

  [PS3552.O932134 1990]

  813’.54—dc20 89-29956

  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, resold, 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.

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  For Kerrie, Milo, and Spencer

  You know that the best you can

  expect is to avoid the worst.

  Italo Calvino,

  If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

  C O N T E N T S

  Sorry Fugu

  Modern Love

  Hard Sell

  Peace of Mind

  Sinking House

  The Human Fly

  The Hat

  Me Cago en la Leche (Robert Jordan in Nicaragua)

  The Little Chill

  King Bee

  Thawing Out

  The Devil and Irv Cherniske

  The Miracle at Ballinspittle

  Zapatos

  The Ape Lady in Retirement

  If the River Was Whiskey

  IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY

  S O R R Y F U G U

  “LIMP RADICCHIO.”

  “Sorry fugu.”

  “A blasphemy of baby lamb’s lettuce, frisee, endive.”

  “A coulibiac made in hell.”

  For six months he knew her only by her by-line—Willa Frank—and by the sting of her adjectives, the derisive thrust of her metaphors, the cold precision of her substantives. Regardless of the dish, despite the sincerity and ingenuity of the chef and the freshness or rarity of the ingredients, she seemed always to find it wanting. “The duck had been reduced to the state of the residue one might expect to find in the nether depths of a funerary urn”; “For all its rather testy piquancy, the orange sauce might just as well have been citron preserved in pickling brine”; “Paste and pasta. Are they synonymous? Hardly. But one wouldn’t have known the difference at Udolpho’s. The ‘fresh’ angel hair had all the taste and consistency of mucilage.”

  Albert quailed before those caustic pronouncements, he shuddered and blanched and felt his stomach drop like a croquette into a vat of hot grease. On the morning she skewered Udolpho’s, he was sitting over a cup of reheated espresso and nibbling at a wedge of hazelnut dacquoise that had survived the previous night’s crush. As was his habit on Fridays, he’d retrieved the paper from the mat, got himself a bite, and then, with the reckless abandon of a diver plunging into an icy lake, turned to the “Dining Out” column. On alternate weeks, Willa Frank yielded to the paper’s other regular reviewer, a big-hearted, appreciative woman by the name of Leonora Merganser, who approached every restaurant like a mother of eight feted by her children on Mother’s Day, and whose praise gushed forth in a breathless salivating stream that washed the reader out of his chair and up against the telephone stand, where he would dial frantically for a reservation. But this was Willa Frank’s week. And Willa Frank never liked anything.

  With trembling fingers—it was only a matter of time before she slipped like a spy, like a murderess, into D’Angelo’s and filleted him like all the others—he smoothed out the paper and focused on the bold black letters of the headline:

  UDOLPHO’S: TROGLODYTIC CUISINE

  IN A CAVELIKE ATMOSPHERE

  He read on, heart in mouth. She’d visited the restaurant on three occasions, once in the company of an abstract artist from Detroit, and twice with her regular companion, a young man so discerning she referred to him only as “The Palate.” On all three occasions, she’d been—sniff—disappointed. The turn-of-the-century gas lamps Udolpho’s grandfather had brought over from Naples hadn’t appealed to her (“so dark we joked that it was like dining among Neanderthals in the sub-basement of their
cave”), nor had the open fire in the massive stone fireplace that dominated the room (“smoky, and stinking of incinerated chestnuts”). And then there was the food. When Albert got to the line about the pasta, he couldn’t go on. He folded the paper as carefully as he might have folded the winding sheet over Udolpho’s broken body and set it aside.

  It was then that Marie stepped through the swinging doors to the kitchen, the wet cloth napkin she’d been using as a dishrag clutched in her hand. “Albert?” she gasped, darting an uneasy glance from his stricken face to the newspaper. “Is anything wrong? Did she—? Today?”

  She assumed the worst, and now he corrected her in a drawl so lugubrious it might have been his expiring breath: “Udolpho’s.”

  “Udolpho’s?” Relief flooded her voice, but almost immediately it gave way to disbelief and outrage. “Udolpho’s?” she repeated.

  He shook his head sadly. For thirty years Udolpho’s had reigned supreme among West Side restaurants, a place impervious to fads and trends, never chic but steady—classy in a way no nouvelle mangerie with its pastel walls and Breuer chairs could ever hope to be. Cagney had eaten here, Durante, Roy Rogers, Anna Maria Alberghetti. It was a shrine, an institution.

  Albert himself, a pudgy sorrowful boy of twelve, ridiculed for his flab and the great insatiable fist of his appetite, had experienced the grand epiphany of his life in one of Udolpho’s dark, smoky, and—for him, at least—forever exotic banquettes. Sampling the vermicelli with oil, garlic, olives, and forest mushrooms, the osso buco with the little twists of bow-tie pasta that drank up its buttery juices, he knew just as certainly as Alexander must have known he was born to conquer, that he, Albert D’Angelo, was born to eat. And that far from being something to be ashamed of, it was glorious, avocation and vocation both, the highest pinnacle to which he could aspire. Other boys had their Snider, their Mays, their Reese and Mantle, but for Albert the magical names were Pellaprat, Escoffier, Udolpho Melanzane.

  Yes. And now Udolpho was nothing. Willa Frank had seen to that.

  Marie was bent over the table now, reading, her piping girlish voice hot with indignation.

  “Where does she come off, anyway?” Albert shrugged. Since he’d opened D’Angelo’s eighteen months ago the press had all but ignored him. Yes, he’d had a little paragraph in Barbed Wire, the alternative press weekly handed out on street corners by greasy characters with straight pins through their noses, but you could hardly count that. There was only one paper that really mattered—Willa Frank’s paper—and while word of mouth was all right, without a review in the paper, you were dead. Problem was, if Willa Frank wrote you up, you were dead anyway.

  “Maybe you’ll get the other one,” Marie said suddenly. “What’s her name—the good one.”

  Albert’s lips barely moved. “Leonora Merganser.”

  “Well, you could.”

  “I want Willa Frank,” he growled.

  Marie’s brow lifted. She closed the paper and came to him, rocked back from his belly, and pecked a kiss to his beard. “You can’t be serious?”

  Albert glanced bitterly around the restaurant, the simple pine tables, whitewashed walls, potted palms soft in the filtered morning light. “Leonora Merganser would faint over the Hamburger Hamlet on the corner, Long John Silver’s, anything. Where’s the challenge in that?”

  “Challenge? But we don’t want a challenge, honey—we want business. Don’t we? I mean if we’re going to get married and all—”

  Albert sat heavily, took a miserable sip of his stone-cold espresso. “I’m a great chef, aren’t I?” There was something in his tone that told her it wasn’t exactly a rhetorical question.

  “Honey, baby,” she was in his lap now, fluffing his hair, peering into his ear, “of course you are. The best. The very best. But—”

  “Willa Frank,” he rumbled. “Willa Frank. I want her.”

  There are nights when it all comes together, when the monkfish is so fresh it flakes on the grill, when the pesto tastes like the wind through the pines and the party of eight gets their seven appetizers and six entrées in palettes of rising steam and delicate colors so perfect they might have been a single diner sitting down to a single dish. This night, however, was not such a night. This was a night when everything went wrong.

  First of all, there was the aggravating fact that Eduardo—the Chilean waiter who’d learned, à la Chico Marx, to sprinkle superfluous “ahs” through his speech and thus pass for Italian—was late. This put Marie off her pace vis-à-vis the desserts, for which she was solely responsible, since she had to seat and serve the first half-dozen customers. Next, in rapid succession, Albert found that he was out of mesquite for the grill, sun-dried tomatoes for the fusilli with funghi, capers, black olives, and, yes, sun-dried tomatoes, and that the fresh cream for the frittata piemontese had mysteriously gone sour. And then, just when he’d managed to recover his equilibrium and was working in that translated state where mind and body are one, Roque went berserk.

  Of the restaurant’s five employees—Marie, Eduardo, Torrey, who did day-cleanup, Albert himself, and Roque—Roque operated on perhaps the most elemental level. He was the dishwasher. The Yucatano dishwasher. Whose responsibility it was to see that D’Angelo’s pink and gray sets of heavy Syracuse china were kept in constant circulation through the mid-evening dinner rush. On this particular night, however, Roque was slow to accept the challenge of that responsibility, scraping plates and wielding the nozzle of his supersprayer as if in a dream. And not only was he moving slowly, the dishes, with their spatters of red and white sauce and dribbles of grease piling up beside him like the Watts Towers, but he was muttering to himself. Darkly. In a dialect so arcane even Eduardo couldn’t fathom it.

  When Albert questioned him—a bit too sharply, perhaps: he was overwrought himself—Roque exploded. All Albert had said was, “Roque—you all right?.” But he might just as well have reviled his mother, his fourteen sisters, and his birthplace. Cursing, Roque danced back from the stainless-steel sink, tore the apron from his chest, and began scaling dishes against the wall. It took all of Albert’s 220 pounds, together with Eduardo’s 180, to get Roque, who couldn’t have weighed more than 120 in hip boots, out the door and into the alley. Together they slammed the door on him—the door on which he continued to beat with a shoe for half an hour or more—while Marie took up the dishrag with a sigh.

  A disaster. Pure, unalloyed, unmitigated. The night was a disaster.

  Albert had just begun to catch up when Torrey slouched through the alley door and into the kitchen, her bony hand raised in greeting. Torrey was pale and shrunken, a nineteen-year-old with a red butch cut who spoke with the rising inflection and oblate vowels of the Valley Girl, born and bred. She wanted an advance on her salary.

  “Momento, momento,” Albert said, flashing past her with a pan of béarnaise in one hand, a mayonnaise jar of vivid orange sea-urchin roe in the other. He liked to use his rudimentary Italian when he was cooking. It made him feel impregnable.

  Meanwhile, Torrey shuffled halfheartedly across the floor and positioned herself behind the porthole in the “out” door, where, for lack of anything better to do, she could watch the customers eat, drink, smoke, and finger their pastry. The béarnaise was puddling up beautifully on a plate of grilled baby summer squash, the roe dolloped on a fillet of monkfish nestled snug in its cruet, and Albert was thinking of offering Torrey battle pay if she’d stay and wash dishes, when she let out a low whistle. This was no cab or encore whistle, but the sort of whistle that expresses surprise or shock—a “Holy cow!” sort of whistle. It stopped Albert cold. Something bad was about to happen, he knew it, just as surely as he knew that the tiny hairs rimming his bald spot had suddenly stiffened up like hackles.

  “What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

  Torrey turned to him, slow as an executioner. “I see you got Willa Frank out there tonight—everything going okay?”

  The monkfish burst into flame, the béarnaise turned to wat
er, Marie dropped two cups of coffee and a plate of homemade millefoglie.

  No matter. In an instant, all three of them were pressed up against the little round window, as intent as torpedoers peering through a periscope. “Which one?” Albert hissed, his heart doing paradiddles.

  “Over there?” Torrey said, making it a question. “With Jock—Jock McNamee? The one with the blond wig?”

  Albert looked, but he couldn’t see. “Where? Where?” he cried. “There? In the corner?”

  In the corner, in the corner. Albert was looking at a young woman, a girl, a blonde in a black cocktail dress and no brassiere, seated across from a hulking giant with a peroxide-streaked flattop. “Where?” he repeated.

  Torrey pointed.

  “The blonde?” He could feel Marie go slack beside him. “But that can’t be—” Words failed him. This was Willa Frank, doyenne of taste, grande dame of haute cuisine, ferreter out of the incorrect, the underachieved, and the unfortunate? And this clod beside her, with the great smooth-working jaw and forearms like pillars, this was the possessor of the fussiest, pickiest, most sophisticated and fastidious palate in town? No, it was impossible.

  “Like I know him, you know?” Torrey was saying. “Jock? Like from the Anti-Club and all that scene?”

  But Albert wasn’t listening. He was watching her—Willa Frank—as transfixed as the tailorbird that dares look into the cobra’s eye. She was slim, pretty, eyes dark as a houri’s, a lot of jewelry—not at all what he’d expected. He’d pictured a veiny elegant woman in her fifties, starchy, patrician, from Boston or Newport or some such place. But wait, wait: Eduardo was just setting the plates down—she was the Florentine tripe, of course—a good dish, a dish he’d stand by any day, even a bad one like…but the Palate, what was he having? Albert strained forward, and he could feel Marie’s lost and limp hand feebly pressing his own. There: the veal piccata, yes, a very good dish, an outstanding dish. Yes. Yes.