The Men's Club

by Leonard Michaels

  ‘The best writer I have ever encountered … one of the best American stylists of the 20th century.’

  – David Bezmozgis

  ‘An extraordinarily original and gifted talent.’

  – William Styron

  ‘A brilliant and original stylist.’

  – London Review of Books

  ‘One of the strongest and most arresting prose talents of his generation.’

  – Larry McMurtry

  ‘Like Grace Paley and Philip Roth … Michaels’ vernacular achieves the level of song.’

  – New York Times

  ‘Leonard Michaels wrote prose of exquisite clarity.’

  – Ian McEwan, Guardian

  The Men’s Club

  LEONARD MICHAELS

  DAUNT BOOKS

  FOR BRENDA

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  WOMEN WANTED TO TALK about anger, identity, politics, etc. I saw posters in Berkeley urging them to join groups. I saw their leaders on TV. Strong, articulate faces. So when Cavanaugh phoned and invited me to join a men’s club, I laughed. Slowly, not laughing, he repeated himself. He was six foot nine. The size and weight entered his voice. He and some friends wanted a club. ‘A regular social possibility outside of our jobs and marriages. Nothing to do with women’s groups.’ One man was a tax accountant, another was a lawyer. There was also a college teacher like me and two psychotherapists. Solid types. I supposed there could be virtues in a men’s club, a regular social possibility. I should have said yes immediately, but something in me resisted. The prospect of leaving my house after dinner to go to a meeting. Blood is heavy then. Brain is slow. Besides, wasn’t this club idea corny? Like trying to recapture high-school days. Locker-room fun. Wet naked boys snapping towels at each other’s genitals. It didn’t feel exactly right. To be wretchedly truthful, any social possibility unrelated to wife, kids, house and work felt like a form of adultery. Not criminal. Not legitimate.

  ‘Cavanaugh, I don’t even go to the movies anymore.’

  ‘I’m talking about a men’s club. Good company. You talk about women’s groups. Movies. Can’t you hear me?’

  ‘When the phone rings, it’s like an attack on my life. I get confused. Say it again.’

  ‘Listen to me, man. You’re one of my best friends. You live less than a mile away, but do we see each other three times a year? When is the last time we talked to each other, really talked?’

  ‘I lose over a month a year just working to pay property taxes. Friendship is a luxury. Unless you’re so poor it makes no difference how you spend your time.’

  ‘A men’s club. Good company.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  But I was thinking about good company. Some of my married colleagues had love affairs, usually with students. You could call it a regular social possibility. It included emotional chaos. Gonorrhoea. Even guilt. They would have been better off in a men’s club.

  ‘What do you say? Can we expect you?’

  ‘I’ll go to the first meeting. I can’t promise more. I’m very busy.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Cavanaugh and gave me an address in the Berkeley flats. A man named Harry Kramer lived there. I was to look for a redwood fence and pine trees.

  The night of the meeting I told my wife I’d be home early. Before midnight, certainly. I had to teach the next day. She said, ‘Take out the garbage.’ Big sticky bag felt unpropitious and my hands soon smelled of tuna fish. After driving only five minutes, I found the place.

  The front of the house, vine-covered, seemed to brood in lunatic privacy. Nobody answered when I knocked, but I heard voices, took hold of a wrought-iron handle and pushed, discovering a large Berkeley living room and five men inside. I saw dark wood panelling and potted ferns dangling from exposed beams. Other plants along the window ledges. A potted tree in a far corner, skinny, spinsterish-looking. Nervous yellow leaves filled its head. Various ceramics, bowls on tabletops and plates on the walls beside large acrylic paintings, abstractions like glistening viscera splashed off a butcher block. Also an amazing rug, but I couldn’t take it in. A man was rising from a pillow, coming towards me, smiling.

  ‘I knocked,’ I said.

  ‘Come in, man. I’m Harry Kramer.’

  ‘I’m Cavanaugh’s friend.’

  ‘Who isn’t?’

  ‘Really,’ I said, giving it the LA inflection to suggest sympathetic understanding, not wonder. Kramer registered the nuance and glanced at me as at a potential brother.

  His heavy black hair was controlled by a style, parted in the middle and shaped to cup his ears in a way that once belonged to little girls. It was contradicted by black force in his eyes, handshake like a bite, and tattooed forearms. Blue, winged snake. Blue dagger amid roses. They spoke for an earlier life, I supposed, but Kramer wore his sleeves rolled to the elbow. It was hard to connect him with his rug, which I began to appreciate as spongy and orange. I felt myself wading and bouncing through it as Kramer led me towards the men.

  Shaking hands, nodding hello, saying my name, each man was a complex flash – eyes, hand, name – but one had definition. He was graphic; instantly closer to me than the others. Solly Berliner. Tall, skinny, wearing a suit. Dead-white hair and big greenish light in his eyes. The face of an infant surprised by senility. His suit was grey polyester, conservative and sleazy. Kramer left me with Berliner beside the potted tree, a beer in my hand. A man about five foot six or seven came right up to us. ‘Care for a taste?’ In his palm lay two brown marijuanas, slick with spittle. I declined. Berliner said, ‘Thanks, thanks,’ with frightening gratitude, and took both cigarettes. We laughed. Then he dropped one back into the man’s palm. Turning towards the others, the man said, ‘Anyone care for a taste?’

  The sound of Berliner’s voice lingered after the joke; loud, impulsive. Maybe he felt uneasy. Out of his natural environment. I couldn’t guess where that might be. He was a confusion of clues. The suit wasn’t Berkeley. The eyes were worlds of feeling. His speedy voice flew from nerves. Maybe the living room affected him. A men’s club would have seemed more authentic, more properly convened, elsewhere. What did I have in mind? A cold ditch? I supposed Kramer’s wife, exiled for the evening, had cultivated the plants and picked the orange rug and the luscious fabrics on the couches and chairs. Ideas of happiness. Berliner and I remained standing, as if the fabrics – heavy velvets, beige tones – were nothing to violate with our behinds. It was a woman’s living room, but so what? The point of the club was to be with men, not to worry about women. I turned to Berliner and asked what he did for a living.

  ‘Real estate,’ he said, grinning ferociously, as if extreme types were into that. Wild fellows. ‘I drove in from San Jose.’ He spoke with rapid little shrugs, as if readjusting his vertebrae. His eyes, after two drags on the cigarette, were full of green distance. He was already driving back to San Jose, I figured. Then he said, ‘Forgive me for saying this, but a minute ago, when Kramer introduced us, I had a weird thought.’

  ‘You did?’

  His eyes returned to me with a look I’d seen before. It signalled the California plunge into truth.

  ‘I hope this doesn’t bother you. I thought …’

  I waited.

  ‘Oh, forget it, man.’

  ‘No, please go on. What did you think?’

  ‘I thought you had a withered leg.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yeah, but I see you
don’t. Isn’t that weird?’

  ‘Weird that I don’t have a withered leg?’

  ‘Yeah, I thought your leg was all screwed up. Like withered.’

  I wiggled my legs. For my sake, not his. He stared as if into unusual depths and seemed, regardless of my wiggling, not convinced. Then he said, ‘I’m forty-seven.’

  ‘You look much younger.’ This was true. But, with the white hair, he also looked older.

  ‘I stay in shape,’ he answered, marijuana smoke leaking from his nostrils. ‘Nobody,’ he said, sucking the leak back against crackling sheets of snot, ‘nobody else in the room is forty-seven. I’m oldest. I asked the guys.’

  He gagged, then released smoke, knifing it through compressed lips. ‘Kramer is thirty-eight.’

  I wondered if conversation had ever been more like medical experience, so rich in gas and mucus. ‘I’m always the oldest. Ever since I was a kid I was the oldest.’ He giggled and intensified his stare, waiting for me to confess something, too. I giggled back at him in a social way. Then the door opened and Cavanaugh walked in.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, intimating regret but moving quickly away.

  My friend Cavanaugh – big, handsome guy – had heroic charisma. He’d been a professional basketball player. Now he worked at the university in special undergraduate programmes, matters of policy and funding. Nine to five, jacket and tie. To remember his former work – the great naked shoulders and legs flying through the air – was saddening. In restaurants and airports people still asked for his autograph.

  Things felt better, more natural, healthier, with the big man in the room. Kramer reached him before I did. They slapped each other’s arms, laughing, pleased at how they felt to each other. Solid. Real. I watched, thinking I’d often watched Cavanaugh. Ever since college, in fact, when he’d become famous. To see him burn his opponent and score was like a miracle of justice. In civilian clothes, he was faintly disorienting. Especially his wristwatch, a golden, complicated band. Symbolic manacle. Cavanaugh’s submission to ordinary life. He didn’t burn anybody. He’d once said, ‘I don’t want my kids to grow up like me, necks thicker than their heads.’ He wanted his kids in jackets and wristwatches.

  He stopped slapping Kramer’s arms, but Kramer continued touching him and looked as though he might soon pee in his pants. People love athletes. Where else these days do they see such mythic drama? Images of unimpeachable excellence. I was infected by Kramer’s enthusiasm, a bit giddy now at the sight of Cavanaugh. When Kramer left to get him a beer, we shook hands. He said, ‘I didn’t think I’d see you tonight.’ There was mockery in his smile.

  ‘It’s not so easy getting out of the house. Nobody but you could have dragged me to this.’

  ‘You open the door, you’re out.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re here. Anything happen yet? I’m a little late because Sarah thinks the club idea is wrong. I’m wrong to be here. We argued at dinner.’ He whispered, ‘Maybe it isn’t easy,’ and looked at his wristwatch, frowning, as if it were his mind. Kramer returned with the beer just as a phone started ringing.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ said Kramer, turning to the ringing.

  Sarah’s word ‘wrong’ seemed wrong to me. If something was wrong with Cavanaugh, it was wrong with the universe. Men could understand that. When Cavanaugh needed a loan to buy his house, the bank gave him no trouble. You could see his credit was good; he was six foot nine and could run a hundred yards in ten seconds. The loan officer, a man, recognised Cavanaugh and didn’t even ask about his recent divorce or alimony payments.

  Men’s clubs. Women’s groups. They suggest incurable disorders. I remembered Socrates – how the boys, not his wife, adored him. And Karl Marx running around with Engels while Jenny stayed home with the kids. Maybe men played more than women. A men’s club, compared to women’s groups, was play. Frivolous; virtually insulting. It excluded women. But I was thinking in circles. A men’s club didn’t exclude women. It also didn’t exclude kangaroos. It included only men. I imagined explaining this to Sarah. ‘You see, men love to play.’ It didn’t feel convincing. She had strong opinions and a bad temper. When Cavanaugh quit basketball, it was his decision, but I blamed her anyway. She wanted him home. The king became the dean.

  Kramer shouted from another room, ‘Is anybody here named Terry? His wife is on the phone. She’s crying.’ Shouting again, more loudly, as if to make sure the woman on the phone would hear him, Kramer said, ‘Is anybody in this house named Terry?’

  Nobody admitted to being named Terry.

  Shouting again, Kramer said, ‘Terry isn’t here. If Terry shows up, I’ll tell him to phone you right away. No, I won’t forget.’

  When Kramer returned he said, ‘You guys sure none of you is named Terry?’

  Cavanaugh muttered, ‘We’re all named Terry. Let’s get this club started.’

  We made a circle, some of us sitting on the rug on pillows. Kramer began talking in a slow, rational voice. The black eyes darkened his face. His words became darker, heavier, because of them.

  ‘What is the purpose of this club?’

  To make women cry, I thought. Kramer’s beginning was not very brilliant, but he looked so deep that I resisted judgement.

  ‘Some of us – Solly Berliner, Paul, Cavanaugh – had a discussion a few weeks ago. We agreed it would be a good idea …’

  Paul was the short, marijuana man; he had an eager face and voice. Kramer nodded to him when he said his name. He went on about the good idea. I wasn’t listening.

  I thought again about the women. Anger, identity, politics, rights, wrongs. I envied them. It seemed attractive to be deprived in our society. Deprivation gives you something to fight for, it makes you morally superior, it makes you serious. What was left for men these days? They already had everything. Did they need clubs? The mere sight of two men together suggests a club. Consider Damon and Pythias, Huck and Jim, Hamlet and Horatio. The list is familiar. Even the Lone Ranger wasn’t lonely. He had Tonto. There is Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, but, generally, two women suggest gossip and a kiss goodbye. Kramer, still talking, meandered in a sea of non-existent purpose. I said, ‘Why are you talking about our purpose? Let’s just say what we want to do.’

  I stopped him midmeander, then felt sorry, wishing I’d kept quiet, but he looked relieved – a little surprised, not offended. ‘Can you make a suggestion?’

  I glanced at Cavanaugh. I was his guest and didn’t want to embarrass him. I’d been too aggressive maybe; too impatient. He said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘I suggest each of us tell the story of his life.’

  The instant I said that I laughed, as if I’d intended a joke. What else could it be? I didn’t tell the story of my life to strangers. Maybe I’d lived too long in California, or I’d given too many lectures at the university; or else I’d been influenced by Berliner, becoming a confessional person. Nobody else laughed. Cavanaugh looked at me with approval. Berliner grinned with rigid ferocity. He loved the suggestion. Kramer said, ‘I’ll go first.’

  ‘You want to? You like the idea?’

  ‘One of us can talk at each meeting. I have listened to numerous life stories in this room.’ Kramer, apparently, was a psychotherapist, but the room seemed an odd place for his business – all the plants, colours, artwork. It burst on every side with cries for attention, excitations, a maniacal fear of boredom.

  ‘It will be good for me,’ he said, ‘to tell the story of my life, especially like this, in a nonprofessional context. It will be a challenge. I’m going to put it on tape. I will tape each of us.’

  I imagined him sitting among his plants and pottery listening to life stories, tape recorder going, dark face and tattoos presiding over all.

  ‘Let’s talk to one another, Kramer. No machines.’

  To my dismay Kramer yelled, ‘Why the hell not? I have so much talk on my tapes – friends, clients, lovers – that I don’t even know what I have. So much I don�
�t even remember.’

  I’d struck something sensitive, but I heard myself yelling back at him, a man who looked angry, even dangerous, ‘If you didn’t put it on tape, you’d remember.’

  Everyone laughed, including Kramer. He said, ‘That’s good, that’s good.’ No anger at all. I was strangely pleased by this violence. I liked Kramer for laughing.

  ‘That’s very good. I’m going to write that down,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Cavanaugh, ‘no tape recorder. But I want an idea of what this life-story business is like.’

  ‘You know what it’s like,’ said Berliner. ‘It’s like in the old movies when people were always talking to each other. Ingrid Bergman tells Humphrey Bogart about herself. Who she is. Where she’s been. Then they screw.’

  A blond man wearing a pastel-blue sweater strained forward in his chair, saying, almost shouting, ‘I saw that movie. On the Late Show, right? Isn’t that right?’ He looked youthful and exceptionally clean. He wore cherry-red jogging shoes, creamy linen slacks, and clear-plastic-framed glasses.

  All the faces became still. He retreated. ‘Maybe it was another movie.’

  Berliner’s face swelled with astonishment, then tightened into eerie screeing, tortured noises: ‘Oh, man, what is your name?’ He pointed at the blond. Kramer, hugging himself, contained his laughter. The blond said, ‘Harold,’ stiffening, recovering dignity. Tears like bits of glass formed in his eyes.

  ‘Oh, Harold,’ said Berliner, ‘that’s the story of my life. My mother used to say, “Solly Berliner, why can’t you be like Harold?” Harold Himmel was the smartest, nicest kid in Brooklyn.’

  ‘My name is Harold Canterbury.’

  ‘Right, man. Forgive me. A minute ago when you were talking, I had a weird thought. I thought – forgive me, man – you had a withered hand.’