The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  When he felt he had regained objectivity, Fogel sat at his desk facing the landlady’s garden behind the house and, dipping his fountain pen into black ink, began a letter to Gary: “I congratulate you on the publication of your first story although I cannot rejoice in it.”

  He tore that up and on another sheet wrote:

  Your story, as is, signified little and one wonders why it was written. Perhaps it represents the desperate act of one determined to break into print without the patience, the art—ultimately—to transmute a piece of gossip into a fiction; and in the process, incidentally, betraying a friend. If this poor thing indicates the force and depth of your imagination, I suggest you give up writing.

  L. E. Vogel, indeed! Yours truly, Eli Fogel.

  P.S. Look up “travail.” It’s an experience not easy to come by.

  After sealing the letter he didn’t send it. We all have our hangups, Fogel thought. Besides, life isn’t that long. He tore it up and sent a Picasso postcard instead, a woman with six faces sitting on a chamber pot.

  Dear Gary, I read your story in SF Unicorn. I wish I could say it was a good story, but it isn’t, not so good as the ones I read last summer that you couldn’t get published. I wish I had had your opportunity to write about L. E. Vogel; I would have done him justice.

  He received, airmail, a four-page, single-spaced letter from Gary.

  To tell the honest truth I was kind of anxious about my writing. I couldn’t finish a story for months after the W.M. conference, and without doubt took the easy way out. All I can say is I hope you will forgive and forget. Once I reread the story in the Unicorn I prayed that you wouldn’t see it. If I have hurt our friendship, which I truly hope I haven’t, I am willing to try to do better if you have the patience. I would like to be a better friend.

  Also I recently read in an article about Thomas Wolfe that he said it was all right to write about other people you might know, but it’s wrong to include their address and phone number. As you know, Mr. Fogel, I have a lot to learn about writing, that’s for sure. As for what you could have done with the same material, please don’t compare your magnificent powers with my poor ones.

  I enclose a picture of my latest bride as well as one of myself.

  In the envelope was an underexposed snapshot of a long-haired brunette in briefest bikini, sitting on a blanket by Gary’s yellow guitar, on a California beach. Resting back on her arms, she stared distantly, certainly not happily, at the birdie; lost, as it were, to time and tide. She looked worn, cheerless, as though she had been had, and was, in her own mind, past having. She seemed to understand what she had experienced. She was, for Fogel, so true, lovely, possible, present, so beautifully formed, that he thought of her as a work of art and audibly sighed.

  Gary, the hero himself of the other, overexposed colored snap, probably taken by the discontented lady herself, wore white bathing trunks, prominent genitals, and a handsome sunburned body; spare, dark, leaner than he was when Fogel had seen him last. His eyes staring blankly at the camera contradicted the smile on his face. Perhaps he was not looking at the unhappy lady but through her. The youth darkened in bright sunlight as the beholder beheld, or was Fogel prejudiced?

  On the back of his picture Gary had scrawled, “You may not recognize me so well. I’ve changed, I’ve lost weight.”

  “What do you mean ‘bride’?” Fogel wrote in the postscript of his reply forgiving Gary. He had urged patience in writing. “If you push time, time pushes you. One has less control.”

  “Not in the married sense,” Gary explained when he appeared in person in Fogel’s flat, in dungaree jacket and field boots, wearing a sixday growth of beard after driving practically nonstop across the country in a new secondhand station wagon, during the winter recess. He had brought his guitar and played “Ochi Chornye” for Fogel.

  They were at first stiff with each other. Fogel, despite good will, felt distaste for the youth, but by degrees relented and they talked exhaustively. The older man had, more than once, to set aside the image of himself dripping along the hotel hallway before he could renew affection for Gary. The guitar helped. His singing sometimes brought tears to the eyes. Ah, the human voice, nothing like it for celebrating or lamenting life. I must have misjudged his capacity to relate, or else he does it better. And why should I bear him a grudge for his errors, considering those I make myself?

  It was therefore freer talk than they had engaged in last summer, as though between equals, about many more interesting matters than when Gary was hastily taking it down to preserve for humanity. Yet as they conversed, particularly when Fogel spoke of writing, the youth’s fingers twitched as though he were recording the older man’s remarks in an invisible notebook, causing him later to say, “Don’t worry if you can’t remember word for word, Gary. Have you read Proust? Even when he remembers he invents.”

  “Not as of yet, but he’s on my list.”

  There was still something naive about him, though he was bright enough and gave the impression that he had experienced more than one ordinarily would have at his age. Possibly this was an effect of the size of his corpus, plenty of room to stuff in experience. Fogel was at the point of asking what women meant to him, but it was a foolish question so he refrained; Gary was young, let him find his way. Fogel would not want to be that young again.

  The youth remained for three days in the small guest room in Fogel’s rent-controlled flat in the three-story brick house on West Ninth Street. Gary one night invited over some friends, Fogel adding two or three former students, including Miss Rudel. A noisy crowded party flowered, especially pleasurable to Fogel when Gary sang, strumming his guitar, and a young man with a thin beard and hair to his shoulders accompanied him on a recorder. Marvelous combinations, inventions, the new youth dreamed up. The guests played records they had brought along and danced. A girl who smelled heavily of pot, dancing barefoot, kissed Fogel and drew him into the circle of her gyrations. The steps weren’t so hard, he decided, really they were no steps, so he pulled off his shoes and danced in his black socks, his limp as though choreographed in. At any rate, no one seemed to notice and Fogel had an enjoyable time. He again felt grateful to the youth for lifting him, almost against his will, out of his solitude.

  On the morning he left, Gary, bathed, shaved, fragrantly lotioned, in white T-shirt and clean cords, tossed a duffel bag into the station wagon and stood talking on the lowest stoop step with Fogel, who had come out to see him off. The writer sensed Gary was leading up to something, although he was ostensibly saying goodbye. After some introductory noises the youth apologized for bringing “this” up but he had a request to make, if Fogel didn’t mind. Fogel, after momentary hesitation, didn’t mind. Gary said he was applying for admission to one or two writing centers in universities on the West Coast and he sort of hoped Fogel would write him a letter of recommendation. Maybe two.

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Hey thanks, Mr. Fogel, and I don’t want to bug you but I hope you won’t mind if I put your name down as a reference on other applications now and then?”

  “What for, Gary? Remember, I’m a working writer.” He felt momentarily uneasy, as though he were being asked to extend credit beyond credit earned.

  “I promise I’ll keep it to the barest minimum. Just if I apply for a fellowship to help me out financially, or something like that.”

  “That seems all right. I’ll consider each request on its merits.”

  “That’s exactly what I want you to do, Mr. Fogel.”

  Before the youth drove off, Fogel was moved to ask him why he wanted to be a writer.

  “To express myself as I am and also create art,” Gary quickly replied. “To convey my experience so that I become part of my readers’ experience, so, as you might say, neither of us is alone.”

  Fogel nodded.

  “Why are you writing?”

  “Because it’s in me to write. Because I can’t not write.” Fogel laughed embarrassedly.

&
nbsp; “That doesn’t contradict what I said.”

  “I wouldn’t want to contradict it.” He did not say Gary remembered his summer notes perhaps better than he knew.

  The youth thrust forth his hand impulsively. “I’m grateful for your friendship as well as hospitality, Mr. Fogel.”

  “Call me Eli if you like.”

  “I’ll certainly try,” Gary said huskily.

  Several months later he wrote from the Coast: “Is morality a necessary part of fiction? I mean, does it have to be? A girl I go with here said it does. I would like to have your opinion. Fondly, Gary.”

  “It is as it becomes aesthetic,” Fogel replied, wondering if the girl was the brunette in the bikini. “Another way to put it is that nothing that is art is merely moral.”

  “I guess what I meant to ask,” Gary wrote, “is does the artist have to be moral?”

  “Neither the artist nor his work.”

  “Thanks for being so frank, Mr. Fogel.”

  In rereading these letters before filing them, Fogel noticed that Gary always addressed him by his last name.

  Better that way.

  In two years Fogel lost four pounds and wrote seventy more pages of his novel. He had hoped to write one hundred and fifty pages but had slowed down. Perfection comes hard to an imperfectionist. He had visions of himself dying before the book was completed. It was a terrible thought: Fogel seated at the table, staring at his manuscript, pen in hand, the page ending in a blot. He had been blocked several months last fall and winter but slowly wrote himself out of it. Afterwards he loved the world a bit better.

  He hadn’t seen Gary during this time, though they still corresponded. Fogel left his letters lying around unopened for months before answering them. The youth had written in November that he was driving East before Christmas and could he call on Fogel? He had answered better not until the writing was going well once more. Gary then wrote, “We must have some kind of mutual ESP, because the same thing has happened to me. I mean it’s mostly because I have been uptight about future worries after I get my M.F.A. in June, especially money worries. Otherwise I’ve had two stories published, as you know, in the last year.” (Both troubled Fogel: unrisen loaves. Gary said they had been “definitely invented.” One was about a sex-starved man and the other about a sex-starved woman.) “And I’ve been thinking ahead because I want to get to work on a novel and wonder if you would like to recommend me to the MacDowell Colony for a six months’ stay so I can get started on it?”

  Fogel wrote: “Gary, I’ve recommended you for everything in sight because I thought you ought to have a chance to prove yourself. But I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit I’ve been doing it uneasily the last one or two times because there’s such a thing as overextending good will. I’ll think it over if you can send me something really good in the way of a fiction, either a new story or chapter or two of your novel.”

  He got in reply, hastily, Gary. The youth appeared several days later, as Fogel was in the street on his way to the liquor store on the corner. He heard the bleat of a horn, a dark green microbus drew up to the curb, and Gary Simson hopped out of the door and pumped the writer’s hand.

  “I have this new story for you.” He held up a black dispatch case.

  Though he smiled broadly he looked as though he hadn’t slept for a week. His face was worn, eyes hardened, as if something in his nature had deepened. He was on the verge of desperate, Fogel thought.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you but I came up from the Coast suddenly, and as you know, you have no phone.” He paused, suffering his usual opening stiffness although Fogel returned his smile.

  “Have you had supper, Gary?”

  “Not as of yet.”

  “We’ll go upstairs and have a bit.”

  “Fantastic,” Gary said. “And it’s a pleasure to see you after all this time gone. You’re looking swell but a little thin and pasty-faced.”

  “Vicissitudes, Gary. Not to mention endless labor, which is the only way I seem able to survive. One ought to be careful how he creates his life’s order.”

  He was about to suggest calling a few people for a party but thought it premature.

  They ate a simple meal. Fogel cooked a tasty soufflé. There was salad, Italian bread, and wine. Both ate hungrily and smoked Gary’s cigars over coffee.

  In Fogel’s study the youth snapped open the dispatch case lock he had been fiddling with—too bad it wasn’t the guitar—and they were at once alertly attentive to each other. Fogel detected an odor of sweat and Gary proved it by wiping his face, then twice around the flushed neck with his handkerchief.

  “This is the first draft of a story I did the other day, my first in months. As I wrote you in my letter, I just wasn’t making the scene for a while. I got the idea for this story the night before last. I was planning to drop in on you yesterday but instead spent the day on twenty cups of coffee in this girl’s room while she was out working, and finally knocked off the story. It feels good to me. Would you care to hear it, Mr. Fogel?”

  “A first draft?” asked Fogel in disappointment. “Why don’t you finish it and let me read it then?”

  “I would certainly do that if the closing date for my application wasn’t hitting me in the eye this coming Monday. I’d really like to work on it another week at the very least, and the only reason I suggest reading it to you now is so you will have a quick idea of the merits of what I’ve done with it so far.”

  “Well, then let me read it myself,” Fogel said. “I get more out of it that way.”

  “My typing isn’t so hot, as you well know, and it’ll be hard for you to make out the corrections in my lousy handwriting. I’d better read it to you.”

  Fogel nodded, removing his shoes to ease his feet. So did Gary. He sat cross-legged on the couch in tennis socks, holding his papers. Fogel, rocking slowly in his rocker, gazed melancholically at the pile of his own manuscript on the writing table. Remembering his youthful aspirations, the writer wanted Gary’s story to be good.

  The youth brushed his lips with a wet thumb. “I haven’t got a sure title yet but I was thinking of calling it ‘Three Go Down.’” He began to read and Fogel’s rocker stopped creaking.

  The narrator of the story was George, a graduate student at Stanford who had driven to New York and, having nothing to do one spring day, had looked up Connie, who had been in love with him last summer. She lived in the West Village, in an apartment with two friends, Grace and Buffy, pretty girls; and soon George, while eating with them, on learning that none of the girls was going out that night, had decided to sleep with each of them, one after the other. He wanted it to be a test of himself. Connie, he figured, he had been in before and knew the way back. Grace was uneasy when he looked her over, which he thought of as an advantage. Buffy, the best looking of the lot, seemed a cool drink of water, aloof or pretending it, maybe impossible, but he wouldn’t think of her as yet. It was a long night and there was no hurry.

  George invited Connie for a walk and later bought her a drink in a bar on Sullivan Street. While they were at the bar he told her he hadn’t forgotten last summer in Bloomington, Indiana. Connie called him a shit for bringing it up. George, after saying nothing, said it had been one of the best summers of his life. He then became deeply silent. They had a second drink and in the street she softened to him and walked close by his side.

  It was a warm airy evening and they wandered in the Village streets. George said it was his impression that Buffy was a pothead, but Connie said it was ridiculous, Buffy was the really stable one of them. She worked for a youth opportunity program as secretary in charge of anything. Her father had been killed in the Korean War and she was devoted to her widowed mother and two younger sisters in Spokane.

  “What about Grace?”

  Connie admitted that Buffy had a lot more patience with Grace than she had. Grace’s problems, though she didn’t say what they were, were more than Connie cared to contend with. “Even when she ha
s a good time she comes home in a funk and pulls out some more of her eyelashes, one by one, while sitting at the mirror.”

  After a while George told Connie that he had loved her last summer but hadn’t been willing to admit it to himself. His father had been hooked into an early marriage and he didn’t want that to happen to him; the old man had regretted it all his life. Connie again called him a shit but let him kiss her when he wanted to.

  When she said she would sleep with him George said there was a mattress in his bus and why bother going upstairs? Connie laughed and said she had never made love in a microbus but was willing to try if he parked in a quiet, private place.

  In the bus he gave it to her the way he remembered she liked it.

  Connie went to bed with a headache. She had said he could stay in the living room till morning and no later. “That’s our rule and Buffy doesn’t like it if we break it.” George sat on the sofa, reading a magazine for a while, then looked into Grace’s room. Her door was open and he went in without knocking. Most of Grace’s eyelashes were gone. She wore a terry-cloth robe and said she didn’t mind talking to George so long as he kept his machismo in his pants. She wasn’t careful with her robe and he saw her large bruised breasts through the nightgown.