The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  Fidelman slowly climbs up the stone, then wooden, stairs, lit generously from bottom clear to top by the bulb, and opens the creaking door into a narrow corridor. He walks along it till he comes to a small room where Bessie is lying in a sagging double bed.

  Hello, Bessie, I’ve been downstairs most of the time, but I came up to say hello.

  Why are you so naked, Arthur? It’s winter outside.

  It’s how I am nowadays.

  Arthur, said Bessie, why did you stop writing for so long? Why didn’t you answer my letters?

  I guess I had nothing much to write. Nothing much has happened to me. There wasn’t much to say.

  Remember how Mama used to give us an apple to eat with a slice of bread?

  I don’t like to remember those things anymore.

  Anyway, thanks for coming up to see me, Arthur. It’s a nice thing to do when a person is so alone. At least I know what you look like and where you are nowadays.

  Bessie died and rose to heaven, holding in her heart her brother’s hello.

  Flights of circles, cones, triangles.

  End of drypoint etching.

  The ugly and plebeian face with which Rembrandt was ill-favored was accompanied by untidy and dirty clothes, since it was his custom, when working, to wipe his brushes on himself, and to do other things of a similar nature. Jakob Rosenberg.

  If you’re dead how do you go on living?

  Natura morta: still life. Oil on paper.

  1968

  An Exorcism

  Fogel, a writer, had had another letter from Gary Simson, the wouldbe writer, a request as usual. He wrote fiction but hadn’t jelled. Fogel, out of respect, saved letters from writers but was tempted not to include Simson although he had begun to publish. I am not his mentor, though he calls himself my student. If so, what have I taught him? In the end he placed the letter in his files. I have his others, he thought.

  Eli Fogel was a better than ordinary writer but not especially “successful.” He disliked the word. His productivity was limited by his pace, which, for reasons of having to breathe hard to enjoy life, was slow. Two and a half books in fifteen years, the half a paperback of undistinguished verse. My limp is symbolic, he thought. His leg had been injured in a bicycle accident as a youth, though with the built-up shoe the limp was less noticeable than when he hobbled around barefoot. He limped for his lacks. Fogel, for instance, regretted never having married, blaming this on his devotion to work. It’s not that it has to be one or the other, but for me it’s one or none. He was, mildly, a monomaniac. That simplified life but reduced it—what else? Still, he did not pity himself. It amused Fogel rather than not that the protagonists of his two published novels were married men with families, their wounds deriving from sources other than hurt members and primal loneliness. Imagination saves me, he thought.

  Both his novels had received praise, though not much else; and Fogel had for the past six years labored on a third, about half completed. Since he declined to write reviews, lecture, or teach regularly, he ran into money problems. Fortunately he had from his father a small inheritance that came to five thousand annually, a shrinking sum in an inflated world; so Fogel reluctantly accepted summer-school invitations, or taught, somewhat on the prickly side, at writers’ conferences, one or two a summer. With what he had he made do.

  It was at one of these conferences, in Buffalo, in June, and at another in mid-August of the same summer, on the campus of a small college in the White Mountains, that the writer had met, and later renewed a friendship with, Gary Simson, then less than half Fogel’s age; a friendship of sorts, mild, fallible, but for a while satisfying; that is to say, possessing some of the attributes and possibilities of friendship.

  Gary, a slight glaze in his eyes as he listened to Fogel talk about writing, wanted, he seriously confessed with a worried brow, “more than anything,” even “desperately,” to be a writer—the desperation inciting goose bumps on Fogel’s flesh, putting him off for a full fifteen minutes. He sat in depressed silence in his office as the youth fidgeted. “What’s the rush?” the writer ultimately asked. “I’ve got to get there,” the youth replied. “Get where?” “I want to be a good writer someday, Mr. Fogel.” “It’s a long haul, my boy,” Eli Fogel said. “Make a friend of time. And steer clear of desperation. Desperate people tend to be bad writers, increasing desperation.” He laughed a little, not unkindly. Gary sat nodding as though he had learned the lesson of his life. He was twenty-two, a curly-haired senior in college, with a broad fleshy face and frame. On his appearance at the Buffalo conference he wore a full reddish mustache drooping down the sides of his thick-lipped mouth. He shaved it off on meeting Fogel and then grew it again later in the summer. He was six feet tall and his height and breadth made him look older than he was, if not wiser. For a while after his talk with Fogel he pretended to be more casual about his work, one who skirted excess and got it right. He pretended to be Fogel a bit, amusing Fogel. He had never had a disciple before and felt affection for the boy. Gary livened things up for the writer. One could see him in the distance, coming with his yellow guitar. He strummed without distinction but sang fairly well, a tenor aspiring, related to art. “Sing me ‘Ochi Chornye,’ Gary,” Fogel said, and the youth obliged as the older man became pleasantly melancholic, thinking what if he’d had a son. Touch a hand to a guitar and Fogel had a wet eye. And Gary offered services as well as devoted attention: got books Fogel needed from the library; drove him into town when he had errands to do; could be depended on to retrieve forgotten lecture notes in his room —as if it were in compensation, though Fogel required none, for the privilege of sitting at his feet and plying him with questions about the art of fiction. Fogel, touched by his amiability, all he had yet to learn, by his own knowledge of the sadnesses of a writer’s life, invited him, usually with one or another of his friends, to his room for a drink before dinner. Gary brought along a thick notebook to jot down Fogel’s table talk. He showed him the first sentence he had copied down: “Imagination is not necessarily Id,” causing the writer when he read it to laugh uncomfortably. Gary laughed too. Fogel thought the note taking silly but didn’t object when Gary scribbled down long passages, although he doubted he had wisdom of any serious sort to offer. He was wiser in his work—one would be who revised often enough. He wished Gary would go to his books for answers to some of the questions he asked and stop treating poor Fogel like a guru.

  “You can’t dissect a writer to learn what writing is or entails. One learns from experience, or should. I can’t teach anyone to be a writer, Gary—I’ve said that in my lectures. All I do here is talk about some things I’ve learned and hope somebody talented is listening. I always regret coming to these conferences.”

  “You can give insights, can’t you?”

  “Insights you can get from your mother.”

  “More specifically, if I might ask, what do you think of my writing thus far, sir?”

  Fogel reflected. “Promise you have—that’s all I can say now, but keep working.”

  “What should I work most for?”

  “Search possibility in and out and beyond the fact. I have the impression when I read your stories—the two in Buffalo and the one you’ve given me here—that you remember or research too much. Memory is an ingredient, Gary, not the whole stew; and don’t make the error some do of living life as though it were a future fiction. Invent, my boy.”

  “I’ll certainly try, Mr. Fogel.” He seemed worried.

  Fogel lectured four mornings a week at eight-thirty so he could spend the rest of the day at work. His large bright room in a guest house close to a pine grove, whose fragrance he breathed as he wrote on a cracked table by a curtained window, was comfortable even on hot afternoons. He worked every day, half day on Sundays, quitting as a rule around four; then soaked in a smallish stained tub, dressed leisurely, whistling through his teeth, in a white flannel suit fifteen years in service, and waited, holding a book before his nose, for someone to come for
a drink. During the last week of the White Mountain conference he saw Gary each night. Sometimes they drove to a movie in town, or walked after supper along a path by a stream, the youth stopping to jot down in his notebook sentences given off by Fogel, chaff as well as grain. They went on until the mosquitoes thickened or Fogel’s limp began to limp. He wore a Panama hat, slightly yellowed, and white shoes he whitened daily, one with a higher heel than the other. Fogel’s pouched dark eyes, even as he spoke animatedly, were contemplative, and he listened with care to Gary though he didn’t always hear. In the last year or two he had lost weight and his white suit hung on his shoulders. He looked small by Gary’s side, although he was shorter by only three inches. And once the youth, in a burst of vitality or affection, his one imaginative act of the summer, lifted Fogel at the hips and held him breathless in the air. The writer gazed into Gary’s gold-flecked eyes; that he found them doorless to the self filled him with remorse.

  Or Gary drove them in his noisy Peugeot to a small piano bar by a crossroads several miles the other side of town, sometimes in the company of one or two students, occasionally a colleague but usually students; and this made it a fuller pleasure because Fogel enjoyed being with women. Gary, who had a talent for acquiring pretty girls, one night brought along one of the loveliest Fogel had ever seen. The girl, about twenty-five, with streaked dyed-blond and dark hair wore a red dress on her long-waisted body, the breasts ample, loose, her buttocks shapely, sweet. A rare find indeed; but the youth, senseless, sullen, or stoned, gave her scant attention. He glanced at her once in a while as if trying to remember where he had met her. Sad-eyed, she drank Scotch on the rocks, gnawing her lip as she watched his eyes roving over the dancers on the floor. Too bad she doesn’t know how much I appreciate her, Fogel mused.

  Where does he get so many attractive girls—he had been equally effective in Buffalo—and why doesn’t he bring the same one two nights running? This blessed creature in red would last me half a lifetime. The youth’s taste in women could not be faulted—but he seemed, after a short time, unmoved by them and yawned openly, although it was rumored he enjoyed an active heterosexual life. He has so many and goes through them so quickly—where does he think one learns longing? Where does poetry come from? She’s too good for him, he thought, not knowing exactly why, unless she was good for him. Ah youth, ah summer. Once again he seriously considered the possibility of marriage. After all, how old is forty-six-not, in any case, old. A good twenty-five or thirty years to go, enough to raise a family.

  On what?

  For his companion Fogel had asked along a schoolteacher from his class, a Miss Rudel from Manhattan, unmarried but not lacking a sense of humor; nor did she take her dabbling in fiction seriously, a pleasant change from the desperate ladies who haunted the conference. But he looked her over and found her wanting, then found himself wanting.

  Perhaps because the evening had acquired a sexual tone he remembered Lucy Matthews, a desperate writer presently attending his lectures. About a week ago, after going through a shoe box full of exasperating stories she had left with him, representing the past year’s work, he had told her bluntly, “Miss Matthews, let’s not pretend that writing is a substitute for talent.” And when she quietly gasped, cracking the knuckles of one hand, then of the other, he went on: “If you are out to save your soul, there are better ways.”

  The lady gazed bleakly at Fogel; a slim woman with fair figure, tense neck, and anxious eyes.

  “But, Mr. Fogel, how does one go about finding out the extent of her talent? Some of my former professors told me I write capable stories, yet you seem to think I’m hopeless.” Tears brimmed in her eyes.

  Fogel was about to soften his judgment but warned himself it would be less than honest to encourage her. She was from Cedar Falls and this was her fourth conference of the summer. He vowed again to give them up forever.

  Lucy Matthews plucked a Kleenex out of her handbag and quietly cried, waiting for perhaps a good word, but the writer, sitting in silence, had none to offer. She got up and hurriedly left the office.

  But at ten o’clock that night, dressed in a taffeta party dress, her hair brushed into a bright sheen, briskly perfumed, Lucy tapped on Fogel’s house door. Accepting his surprised invitation to enter, after three silent sips of bourbon and water, she lifted her noisy dress over her head and stood there naked.

  “Mr. Fogel,” she whispered passionately, “you aren’t afraid to tell the truth. Your work represents art. I feel that if I could hold you in my arms I would be close to both—art and truth.”

  “It just isn’t so,” Fogel replied as he fought off the feeling that he had stepped into a Sherwood Anderson story. “I would like to sleep with you, frankly, but not for the reasons stated. If you had said, ‘Fogel, you may be an odd duck but you’ve aroused me tonight and I would gladly go to bed with you’—could you say that?”

  “If you prefer fellation—” Lucy whispered tensely.

  “Thank you kindly,” he said with tenderness, “I prefer the embrace of a woman. Would you care to answer my question?”

  Shivering around the shoulders, Lucy Matthews came to her finest moment at writing conferences.

  “I can’t truly say so.”

  “Ah, too bad,” Fogel sighed. “Anyway, I’m privileged you saw fit to undress in my presence.”

  She slipped on the dress at her feet and departed. Fogel especially regretted the loss because the only woman he had slept with that summer, a young chambermaid in a Buffalo hotel he had stayed at in June, had hurt him dreadfully.

  “Are you dreaming about something, Mr. Fogel?” Gary asked.

  “Only vaguely,” Fogel replied.

  “An idea for a story, I bet?”

  “It may come to that.”

  When the conference ended, Gary, waiting outside the lecture barn to take Fogel to the train, asked him, “Will I ever be a good writer, do you think, Mr. Fogel?”

  “It depends on commitment. You’ll have to prove yourself.”

  “I will if you have faith in me.”

  “Even if I have no faith in you. Who is Eli Fogel, after all, but a man trying to make his own way through the woods.”

  Fogel smiled at the youth and, though not knowing exactly why, felt he had to say, “One must grow spirit, Gary.”

  The youth blinked in the strong sunlight.

  “I’m glad we’re both writers, Mr. Fogel.”

  The next spring, a wet springtime, Fogel, wandering in a damp hat and coat in the periodical room of the New York Public Library, without forethought plucked off the shelf a college magazine and came upon Gary Simson in the table of contents, as the author of a story called “Travails of a Writer.” He was surprised because they were in correspondence and Gary hadn’t told him he had published his first story. Maybe it wasn’t such a good one? Reading it quickly Fogel found it wasn’t; but that wasn’t why Gary hadn’t mentioned it. The reason depressed him.

  The story concerned a Mr. L. E. Vogel, a sarcastic, self-centered, although not thoroughly bad-natured middle-aged writer with a clubfoot, who wore in summertime a white suit, the pants of which dripped over his heels, an old-fashioned straw hat, and the same yellow knitted necktie, day after day. He was a short man with a loud laugh that embarrassed him, and he walked a good deal though he limped. One summer he had taught at a writers’ conference in Syracuse, New York. There the writer had fallen for a college girl chambermaid at the hotel he had lived in during his two weeks of lecturing. She had slept with him for kicks after learning he had published two novels. Once was enough for her, but Vogel, having tasted young flesh, was hooked hard. He fell in love with the girl, constantly sought her presence—a blond tease of twenty—with solemn offers of marriage, until she became sick of him. To get him off her back she arranged with a boyfriend to enter his room with a passkey and give him a bad time. Vogel, soaking in his afternoon tub, heard someone shout, “Fire, everybody out!” He climbed out of the bath, was grabbed by the arm and shoved
into the hall by the boyfriend, who pulled the door shut after him and disappeared down the stairs. The naked writer wandered like a half-drowned animal in the huge hotel hall, knocking at doors that were slammed in his face, until he found an elderly lady who handed him a blanket to cover himself and phoned the manager for a key to his room. Vogel, heartbroken that the girl had done this to him—he understood at once she had contrived the plot and for what reason—packed and left Syracuse a full week before the conference had ended.

  “Poor Vogel swore off love to keep on writing.”

  End of “Travails of a Writer.”

  Arriving home, Eli Fogel dashed a white pitcher of daffodils to the kitchen floor, and kicked with his bad leg at the shards and flowers.

  “Swine! Have I taught you nothing?”

  Incensed, humiliated to the hilt (the story revived the memory; he suffered from both), Fogel, in a rare rage, cursed out Gary, wished on him a terrifying punishment. But reason prevailed and he wrote him, instead, a scalding letter.

  Where had he got the story? Probably it was rife as gossip. He pictured the girl and her friend regaling all who would hear, screaming over the part where the hairy-chested satyr wanders in a wet daze in the hotel hallway. Gary might easily have heard it from them or friends of theirs. Or perhaps he had slept with the girl and she had confided it directly. Good God, had he put her up to it? No, probably not.

  Why, then, had he written it? Why hadn’t he spared Fogel this mortification, though it was obvious he had not expected him to find the story and read it? That wasn’t the point; the point was he had not refrained—out of friendship—from writing it. So much for friendship. He detested the thought that the boy had sucked up to him all summer to collect facts for the piece. Or possibly he had heard the story and been tempted by it, Fogel hoped, after the White Mountain conference. He had probably harbored the “idea” during the summer but did not decide to write it until he got back to San Francisco, where he went to college. All he had to do was salt the anecdote with some details of appearance, a few mannerisms, and the tale was as good as written, acceptable at once for publication in the college quarterly. Maybe Gary had thought of it as a sort of homage: this good writer I know portrayed as human being. He hadn’t been able to resist. After a summer of too much talk of writing he had felt the necessity of having something immediately in print, no matter what. He had got it down on paper almost wholly as received. It invented nothing, in essence a memoir once removed.