The Bostons - Softcover

Cooke, Carolyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618017682 ISBN 13: 9780618017683

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2001

Synopsis

Carolyn Cooke's stories have been featured in several volumes of PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY AWARDS and THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. Her highly anticipated debut collection tells hilarious and often savage truths about people struggling within the confines of history, society, and class.
Mr. Sargent, the aging Brahmin aesthete of the title story, scribbles his epiphanies on cocktail napkins and covers them up with his drinks. A Maine innkeeper shoots his wife, who remains bitterly loyal to him until the death of their son. A whole family conspires to keep the birth of yet another dirt-poor relation a secret from his grandmother. On the icy cobblestone streets of Boston and the rockbound coast of Maine, these vividly realized characters try to reconcile habits of obedience and self-reliance with the urgent desire to capture the wild core of life. The result is an explosion of exquisitely tuned voices, as authentic as they are unforgettable.

About this title

About the Author:

CAROLYN COOKE’s stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories and twice in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, Cooke has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Yaddo. Born in Maine and raised in Boston, she has been a staff writer for Penthouse and reviewed fiction for The Nation. She lives in northern California with her husband and two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Bob Darling

Bob darling spent the day and the evening on the fastest train in
Europe. At first the train lugged slowly through yellow towns, then
it
began to pull together its force and go. The landscape slid past. In
one stroke the train braced and broke through the air into a river of
dinning sound. It climaxed at 380 kmh. Darling heard this news from a
German across the aisle, but he"d already sensed the speed in a
deeper
bone. His body was attuned to the subtle flux of high speed, the jazz
pulse, the fizz.
He closed his eyes, registered the scrape of the antimacassar
against his brittle hairs, and dozed. Dying tired him, so did the
drugs he took to keep from urinating on the seat. But he never let
himself go that far, to close his eyes, unless the buzz of speed was
in him, the drone of engines, the zhzhzh of jets.
On the seat beside him lounged a beautiful young woman named
Carla. She was a baby, vague on facts and ahistorical; she talked too
much, she pouted when she didn"t get her way, she disliked opera, and
she drank. But she had not given him too many terrible
disappointments, and overall Darling felt they had been compatible.
Paris, coming up, would be the last leg of their trip. Darling
planned
the Tuileries, the Orangerie, an afternoon at the Louvre, couscous in
the Latin Quarter, two nights at the Hôtel Angleterre.
That would be the end of it. Back home he would see her
occasionally in the cafés he had first shown her and they would
exchange shrill pleasantries. Sometime, perhaps, in the future, he
could take her out for dinner and liquor at one of those subterranean
French restaurants in Cambridge and afterward press himself on her.
But one day she would move, get a job, find a lover, change her life.
She would look at her calendar and think she had not seen him in
months, or years. But she wouldn"t call him until she was sure that
he was dead.
(What would that be like? What if he didn"t know, if the end
of it was not-knowing, if not-knowing was the surprise? What if there
was nothing afterward? Where would the information go he had put into
his head over the years — the names of kings, the taste of food, the
memory of his mother and his father, the fact that louvre is early
French for "leper," that lava is mainly water, loose facts, what
Thoreau said: "Our molting season, like that of fowls, must be a
crisis in our lives," the names of women, the names of small hotels?
Would the contents of his busy head be wasted, lost?)
He opened his eyes. A crowd of old men on bicycles crashed by
outside the window and were gone. Carla leaned into the Michelin
guide; the lemony point of her nose and the book vibrated perceptibly
to the motion of the train. Her eyes were puffy, from sleep maybe.
She still had on her dress from the evening before — a strapless —
and some cosmetic residue sparkled on her neck. Her sharp perfume
hung on the air. She could sit for hours that way, a packet of French
cigarettes and a bottle of Perrier balanced on the seat beside her,
her bare feet crossed in her lap. She read any trash for hours and
ignored the view. Travel, Darling thought irritably, was a vacation
for her.
"The Train à Grande Vitesse," she said now, out of nowhere.
"The TGV, yes, that"s the train we"re on now," he said.
"You called it the Très Grande Vitesse," said Carla, looking
up at him, frowning. "Actually it"s the Train à Grande Vitesse —
train, not très."
"That"s what they call it informally, I guess," he said,
looking across Carla"s lap at the blur of France. "Very Great Speed."
"Informally they call it the TGV. And I know what très means,
thank you."

She was a little bantam, round face, skinny as a refugee, knees like
knuckles. Long arms, down to her knees. Twenty, twenty-two. He was
not an old man, Darling, but compared to her. In her eyes. From that
first afternoon he thought he could get her into bed if he remembered
to call her Carla, not Paula.
He had found her, funnily enough, unconscious on the T. There
were two girls almost exactly alike. It was late afternoon, still
hot; the strings of their bathing suits dangled down the backs of
their necks, one suit red-checked, the other pale blue. Darling had
his leather jacket with him in spite of the heat; he felt a constant
chill.
The girls hung from the hand straps, limp as fringe. First,
one collapsed. The shoes of interested citizens chattered like sets
of teeth around the head. Then the second girl dropped, straight as a
rope. They lay there on the floor of the car, completely vulnerable.
But two girls fainting stank of conspiracy. No one besides Bob
Darling wanted to be taken in.
He hiked his pants so they would not be damaged by his knees
and squatted to greet the girls when they woke. The first one opened
her eyes, and he saw a flattening out of her pupils, her vision
narrowing to familiar and unimaginative suspicions. "What did I, pass
out?" she said.
"You seemed to fall," Darling said.
The girl blinked at him. "My wallet still here?" Her hands
flew up into the air, then lit on a leather pouch fastened at her
waist. "Miracle," she said.
"You want air," he said, and stood her up.
She shook her head. "I"ve got to go to work." It was a shame,
Darling thought; the first girl had a little more shape to her.
"What do you do? I mean that respectfully," Darling assured
her, because he thought she might be a dancer, and Paula had been the
most marvelously uninhibited dancer. His response to her dancing had
always been sexual, but in the most respectful sense.
"Medical records," said the girl.
The second girl opened her eyes and he looked away from the
first girl into her face. She was a scrapper, but not bad-looking.
The first girl got off at Charles Street. Darling marveled at
how she woke from a dead faint and bussed the other girl"s cheeks,
then went off to record the claims of a swollen humanity to life and
health. Sand still sparkling on the back of her neck. That pale blue
string.
His prize was the second girl, Carla; she let him hold her
birdy arm. He liked to think he knew the why and the how of the city.
Did she know the Such-and-Such Café? The apple cake was the thing to
eat. Did she like apple cake? He guided her down into the café, an
empty room underground where all the waiters rushed toward him.
But Carla didn"t want apple cake. She said she was bored
without drinks. She sat across a round table, behind a tumbler of
booze.

She would not be shocked by the news of his death, or the idea of his
illness. "Things break down," she would think with a shrug. But
Darling was still young enough — and the news was fresh enough — that
it came to him as a shock, a surprise. Barely two hours before he
found her, his doctor and old ally, Carnevali, had sighed deeply and
told Darling,
The game
Is not
Quite up
But make your plan.
Appalled, Darling buttoned down his shirt, top to bottom,
over his heart, his lungs, his appendicitis scar. Though the day was
warm, he put on his leather jacket. He was about to hail a taxi when
suddenly he wanted to live among as many people as possible. His eyes
flailed like arms, grasping at the grays and browns and bricks of the
little Puritan city. He went underground, and waited for the Red Line.

His apple cake lay in crumbs before him on a plate. "Let me show you
something," he said, throwing out a spark of spit. He removed a black
leather book and a fountain pen from inside his jacket pocket. A
lozenge flew out too and rolled under the table. He leaned over the
book, showing it to her. "This is Ned Blodgett," he said, and pointed
to a list of numbers. "First-rate lawyer." He looked at Carla. "This
is his office, this is home — his wife"s name is Paula, you"ll like
her, she"s very uninhibited. This is their number in Truro. Ned can
get a message to me anytime. Now here is Jane Purbeck, she walks my
dog when I"m away — you can call her. This is Jack Shortall, here"s
his number. These are reliable people," he said.
He closed the book and slid it across the table. "You take
it. I know all these numbers." Her hand flickered on the
table. "Please," he said. "Even if you don"t want to leave a message,
I will know you can leave a message."
"See your pen?" she said. He handed it over. She opened the
address book to a blank page near the Ws and rolled the pen across it
experimentally. Then she drew an outline of the couple at the next
table, and the table, and a vase with a few flowers in it.
Darling jiggled his leg. "You"re an artist," he told her.
"Nope."
He watched her bear down on the nib and smiled, sipped his
coffee. "That"s a hundred-year-old pen," he said.
Her face emptied. She slipped the cap on the pen and laid it
on the table.
"No," he said gently. "Take it — use it."
"Thanks," she said.
Darling scraped his chair on the floor, hobbled it toward
her, and told her his name. "You can call me Bob, or you can call me
Darling. I mean that respectfully. People call me Darling. Not just
women. Men."
"Darling," she said. "Like the girl in Peter Pan."
"What? Peter Pan?" Darling said excitedly.
"The girl"s name — the one who goes to Never-Never Land with
Peter."
"Not Mary Martin?"
"No — I meant — the Disney," she said.
Darling sniffed. "Life is too short to talk about Walter
Disney," he said.
"Fine," she said. She picked up his pen and twirled it in her
fingers.
It was their first frisson. Darling savored it with coffee.
Together they watched the couple she had drawn eat chicken. The man
ate delicately, pulling the underdone meat away from the bone with
the point of his knife and actually feeding himself with the blade.
His thin white shirt strained to girdle him, and through the fabric
the white loops of his undershirt were legible. The woman ate
quickly, as if other duties called her. She wore a transparent
blouse, which magnified her white arms and the vastness of her
brassiere. Once she stopped chewing, she looked up at him and said
something. The man didn"t look at her, but barked out a laugh. "I"m
not feeling flush tonight," he said.
They buttered their bread and rolled it up so more fit into
their mouths in one bite. When all the food was gone they wiped their
lips with napkins and waited with all their attention until the
waiter came and cleared the plates away.
When the waiter came back with pie and coffee on a tray their
hands flew up to make room for the dishes, their fingers like birds"
wings. They took turns using the cream and sugar. The woman stirred
her coffee and smiled. "Everything I"ve dreamed of for forty years,
it"s coming true," she said loudly.
Darling squeezed Carla"s hand. "Are you hungry?" he asked.
"Oh God, no," she said. "I never eat at night."
*
And yet — he felt this was somehow a contradiction, about eating —
she lived above a busy Indian restaurant in Central Square, in one
room of Chinese paper lanterns, museum posters and a futon on the
floor battened down with sheets and a quilt and ropes of lingerie and
clothes. They sat on the futon — it was the only furniture. There was
an old coal fireplace with a flue out one side, but the blue rug ran
into it. She served him a glass of yellow wine, a ripe tomato.
Everything she had, she offered.
She played Stravinsky"s Firebird on her boom box and rolled
pink lipstick over her lips. When she sprang the checkered brassiere
of her bathing suit and called him to her bed, he realized he was
already there. The slug of strong sensations — desire, hope,
virility — brought tears to his eyes, which Carla mistook for
gratitude.

He hoped to keep his bag of sensations light. Only the most intense
sensations interested him. He had looked forward to this train
because it was the fastest train. He had been very clear with Carla
about this from the start. He wanted to ride the fastest train in
Europe. That was one. Two was, he wanted them to eat the wonderful
six-course dinner they served on the train. He asked her all about it
before they left town, while they were still in the planning stages.
"Fine, Bob, whatever," Carla said when he asked.

Some afternoons they sat under a sun umbrella at the Such-and-Such
Café. Darling spread out the map like a tablecloth under their cups
and crumbs and napkins and brought out sheets of onionskin encoded
with train routes and the names and telephone numbers and addresses
of hotels which he tapped out palely on his manual, having forgone
the pleasures of his pen. Carla gradually warmed to the idea of the
trip. She brushed his cake crumbs from the countries on the map.
She had never heard of Père-Lachaise. She knew only vaguely
of Jim Morrison. Her ignorance was vast, ecumenical. He drew on the
paper cloth with a yellow pencil. He sketched dreamily, from memory.
"What"s that?" she asked.
"It"s a baguette, a kind of long French bread."
"I know what a baguette is, for God"s sake, Bob."
But he could never predict what she knew. He was impressed,
for example, by her seamless demand for caffè macchiato. But she
shrugged and said she didn"t know what it meant — she just liked
bitter coffee. He wondered whether she had broken his pen, bearing
down on the nib, or sold it. He would have liked to show her how the
ink went in so that if the pen stopped working she would not worry
that she was to blame. His heart ached, imagining her humiliation
and shy gratitude.
"You have to speak up — it won"t be any good unless we do
things you want to do," he told her. "We have to plan everything
together. You have to tell me where you want to go, what you want to
see."
Carla had never been to Europe. "I don"t know," she said.
But I know! I know! Her white dress was ancient to a charming
transparency. He would take her — he would show her.
He had read that the dinners on the train were sometimes
oversubscribed. You could eat a croque monsieur in the bar car, but
the thing to do was to get the dinner on the train.
"Fine, whatever," Carla said. "I don"t care what I eat."
He leaned across the table, angry, closed his fingers around
Carla"s wrist, and squeezed.
She ripped his fingers apart, a smooth strong gesture which
surprised him. She laid her hands on her lap. "I eat anything.
Scraps," she said.
He sat up late that night at home, walled in by forty years"
worth of Michelin guides, tax returns, Boston Globes, Playbills,
Symphony programs, creased hotel brochures. He called her at two
o"clock in the morning. "Do you want to go to the Sabine Hills or the
Villa d"Este at Tivoli? Tell me what you want to do."
There was a pause on the line, a certain flattening out in
the expectant air. "Who is this, please?" she said.

And yet, in Europe, it turned out Carla had a terrible talent for
knowing exactly what she wanted to do. Right away, in Venice, she saw
the Lido from a speedboat. "What is it?" she said, and he told her.
"Oh, I want to go and spend a day," she said.
The next morning she brought it up again — she wanted to go
to the Lido and rent a beach chair. But she had agreed already, he
reminded h...

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0618017682
• ISBN 13: 9780618017683
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192