Read If the River Was Whiskey Online
Authors: T.C. Boyle
If the River Was Whiskey
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
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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
O N T E N T S
Me Cago en la Leche (Robert Jordan in Nicaragua)
I
F THE
R
IVER
W
AS
W
HISKEY
O R R Y
F
U G U
“
L
IMP 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:
U
DOLPHO’S
: T
ROGLODYTIC
C
UISINE
IN A
C
AVELIKE
A
TMOSPHERE
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.