The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

  Have I offended him in some way? he asked himself. If so, what did I say that’s so offensive? All I did was remark on the hat in one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and say it looked like the cap he was wearing. How can that be offensive?

  He then thought: No offense where none’s intended. All I have is good will to him. He’s shy and may have been embarrassed in some way—maybe my exuberant voice in the presence of students—if that’s so it’s no fault of mine. And if that’s not it, I don’t know what’s the matter except his own nature. Maybe he hasn’t been feeling well, or it’s some momentary mishigas—nowadays there are more ways of insults without meaning to than ever before—so why raise up a sweat over it? I’ll wait it out.

  But as weeks, then months went by and Rubin continued to shun the art historian—he saw the sculptor only at faculty meetings when Rubin attended them; and once in a while glimpsed him going up or down the left staircase; or sitting in the Fine Arts secretary’s office poring over inventory lists of supplies for sculpture—Arkin thought: Maybe the man is having a breakdown. He did not believe it. One day they met in the men’s room and Rubin strode out without a word. Arkin felt for the sculptor surges of hatred. He didn’t like people who didn’t like him. Here I make a sociable, innocent remark to the son of a bitch—at worst it might be called innocuous—and to him it’s an insult. I’ll give him tit for tat. Two can play.

  But when he had calmed down, Arkin continued to wonder and worry over what might have gone wrong. I’ve always thought I was fairly good in human relationships. Yet he had a worrisome nature and wore a thought ragged if in it lurked a fear the fault was his own. Arkin searched the past. He had always liked the sculptor, even though Rubin offered only his fingertip in friendship; yet Arkin had been friendly, courteous, interested in his work, and respectful of his dignity, almost visibly weighted with unspoken thoughts. Had it, he often wondered, something to do with his mentioning—suggesting—not long ago, the possibility of a new exhibition of his sculpture, to which Rubin had reacted as though his life was threatened?

  It was then he recalled he had never told Rubin how he had felt about his hacked-driftwood show—never once commented on it, although he had signed the guest book. Arkin hadn’t liked the show, yet he wanted to seek Rubin out to name one or two interesting pieces. But when he had located him in the storage room, intently involved with a folio of prints, lost in hangdog introspection so deeply he had been unwilling, or unable, to greet whoever was standing at his back—Arkin had said to himself, Better let it be. He had ducked out of the gallery. Nor had he mentioned the driftwood exhibition thereafter. Was this kindness cruel?

  Still it’s not very likely he’s been avoiding me so long for that alone, Arkin reflected. If he was disappointed, or irritated, by my not mentioning his driftwood show, he would then and there have stopped talking to me, if he was going to stop. But he didn’t. He seemed as friendly as ever, according to his measure, and he isn’t a dissembler. And when I afterwards suggested the possibility of a new show he obviously wasn’t eager to have—which touched him to torment on the spot—he wasn’t at all impatient with me but only started staying out of my sight after the business of his white cap, whatever that meant to him. Maybe it wasn’t my mention of the cap itself that’s annoyed him. Maybe it’s a cumulative thing—three minuses for me? Arkin felt it was probably cumulative; still it seemed that the cap remark had mysteriously wounded Rubin most, because nothing that had happened before had threatened their relationship, such as it was, and it was then at least amicable. Having thought it through to this point, Arkin had to admit he did not know why Rubin acted as strangely as he was now acting.

  Off and on, the art historian considered going down to the sculptor’s studio and there apologizing to him if he had said something inept, which he certainly hadn’t meant to do. He would ask Rubin if he’d mind telling him what bothered him; if it was something else he had inadvertently said or done, he would apologize and clear things up. It would be mutually beneficial.

  One early spring day he made up his mind to visit Rubin after his seminar that afternoon, but one of his students, a bearded printmaker, had found out it was Arkin’s thirty-fifth birthday and presented the art historian with a white ten-gallon Stetson that the student’s father, a traveling salesman, had brought back from Waco, Texas.

  “Wear it in good health, Mr. Arkin,” said the student. “Now you’re one of the good guys.”

  Arkin was wearing the hat, going up the stairs to his office accompanied by the student who had given it to him, when they encountered the sculptor, who grimaced in disgust.

  Arkin was upset, though he felt at once that the force of this uncalled-for reaction indicated that, indeed, the hat remark had been taken by Rubin as an insult. After the bearded student left Arkin he placed the Stetson on his worktable—it had seemed to him—before going to the men’s room; and when he returned the cowboy hat was gone. The art historian searched for it in his office and even hurried back to his seminar room to see whether it could possibly have landed up there, someone having snatched it as a joke. It was not in the seminar room. Arkin thought of rushing down and confronting Rubin nose to nose in his studio, but could not bear the thought. What if he hadn’t taken it?

  Now both evaded each other. But after a period of rarely meeting they began, ironically, Arkin thought, to encounter one another everywhere—even in the streets, especially near galleries on Madison, or Fifty-seventh, or in SoHo; or on entering or leaving movie houses. Each then hastily crossed the street to skirt the other. In the art school both refused to serve together on committees. One, if he entered the lavatory and saw the other, stepped outside and remained a distance away till he had left. Each hurried to be first into the basement cafeteria at lunchtime because when one followed the other in and observed him standing on line, or already eating at a table, alone or in the company of colleagues, invariably he left and had his meal elsewhere.

  Once, when they came in together they hurriedly departed together. After often losing out to Rubin, who could get to the cafeteria easily from his studio, Arkin began to eat sandwiches in his office. Each had become a greater burden to the other, Arkin felt, than he would have been if only one was doing the shunning. Each was in the other’s mind to a degree and extent that bored him. When they met unexpectedly in the building after turning a corner or opening a door, or had come face-to-face on the stairs, one glanced at the other’s head to see what, if anything, adorned it; they then hurried away in opposite directions. Arkin as a rule wore no hat unless he had a cold; and Rubin lately affected a railroad engineer’s cap. The art historian hated Rubin for hating him and beheld repugnance in Rubin’s eyes.

  “It’s your doing,” he heard himself mutter. “You brought me to this, it’s on your head.”

  After that came coldness. Each froze the other out of his life; or froze him in.

  One early morning, neither looking where he was going as he rushed into the building to his first class, they bumped into each other in front of the arched art school entrance. Both started shouting. Rubin, his face flushed, called Arkin “murderer,” and the art historian retaliated by calling the sculptor “hat thief.” Rubin smiled in scorn, Arkin in pity; they then fled.

  Afterwards Arkin felt faint and had to cancel his class. His weakness became nausea, so he went home and lay in bed, nursing a severe occipital headache. For a week he slept badly, felt tremors in his sleep, ate next to nothing. “What has this bastard done to me?” Later he asked, “What have I done to myself?” I’m in this against my will, he thought. It had occurred to him that he found it easier to judge paintings than to judge people. A woman had said this to him once but he denied it indignantly. Arkin answered neither question and fought off remorse. Then it went through him again that he ought to apologize, if only because if the other couldn’t he could. Yet he feared an apology would cripple his craw.

  Half a year later, on his thirty-sixth birthday, Arkin, thinking of his lost
cowboy hat and having heard from the Fine Arts secretary that Rubin was home sitting shiva for his dead mother, was drawn to the sculptor’s studio—a jungle of stone and iron figures—to look around for the hat. He found a discarded welder’s helmet but nothing he could call a cowboy hat. Arkin spent hours in the large skylighted studio, minutely inspecting the sculptor’s work in welded triangular iron pieces, set amid broken stone statuary he had been collecting for years—decorative garden figures placed charmingly among iron flowers seeking daylight. Flowers were what Rubin was mostly into now, on long stalks with small corollas, on short stalks with petaled blooms. Some of the flowers were mosaics of triangles fixing white stones and broken pieces of thick colored glass in jeweled forms. Rubin had in the last several years come from abstract driftwood sculptures to figurative objects—the flowers, and some uncompleted, possibly abandoned, busts of men and women colleagues, including one that vaguely resembled Rubin in a cowboy hat. He had also done a lovely sculpture of a dwarf tree. In the far corner of the studio was a place for his welding torch and gas tanks as well as arc-welding apparatus, crowded by open heavy wooden boxes of iron triangles of assorted size and thickness. The art historian studied each sculpture and after a while thought he understood why talk of a new exhibition had threatened Rubin. There was perhaps one fine piece, the dwarf tree, in the iron jungle. Was this what he was afraid he might confess if he fully expressed himself?

  Several days later, while preparing a lecture on Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Arkin, examining the slides, observed that the portrait of the painter which he had remembered as the one he had seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was probably hanging in Kenwood House in London. And neither hat the painter wore in either gallery, though both were white, was that much like Rubin’s cap. The observation startled Arkin. The Amsterdam portrait was of Rembrandt in a white turban he had wound around his head; the London portrait was him in a studio cap or beret worn slightly cocked. Rubin’s white thing, on the other hand, looked more like an assistant cook’s cap in Sam’s Diner than like either of Rembrandt’s hats in the large oils, or in the other self-portraits Arkin was showing himself on slides. What those had in common was the unillusioned honesty of his gaze. In his self-created mirror the painter beheld distance, objectivity painted to stare out of his right eye; but the left looked out of bedrock, beyond quality. Yet the expression of each of the portraits seemed magisterially sad; or was this what life was if when Rembrandt painted he did not paint the sadness?

  After studying the pictures projected on the small screen in his dark office, Arkin felt he had, in truth, made a referential error, confusing the two hats. Even so, what had Rubin, who no doubt was acquainted with the self-portraits, or may have had a recent look at them—at what had he taken offense?

  Whether I was right or wrong, so what if his white cap made me think of Rembrandt’s hat and I told him so? That’s not throwing rocks at his head, so what bothered him? Arkin felt he ought to be able to figure it out. Therefore suppose Rubin was Arkin and Arkin Rubin—Suppose it was me in his hat: “Here I am, an aging sculptor with only one show, which I never had confidence in and nobody saw. And standing close by, making critical pronouncements one way or another, is this art historian Arkin, a big-nosed, gawky, overcurious gent, friendly but no friend of mine because he doesn’t know how to be. That’s not his talent. An interest in art we have in common, but not much more. Anyway, Arkin, maybe not because it means anything in particular—who says he knows what he means?—mentions Rembrandt’s hat on my head and wishes me good luck in my work. So say he meant well—but it’s still more than I can take. In plain words it irritates me. The mention of Rembrandt, considering the quality of my own work, and what I am generally feeling about life, is a fat burden on my soul because it makes me ask myself once too often—why am I going on if this is the kind of sculptor I am going to be for the rest of my life? And since Arkin makes me think the same unhappy thing no matter what he says—or even what he doesn’t say, as for instance about my driftwood show—who wants to hear more? From then on I avoid the guy—like forever.”

  After staring in the mirror in the men’s room, Arkin wandered on every floor of the building, and then wandered down to Rubin’s studio. He knocked on the door. No one answered. After a moment he tested the knob; it gave, he thrust his head into the room and called Rubin’s name. Night lay on the skylight. The studio was lit with many dusty bulbs but Rubin was not present. The forest of sculptures was. Arkin went among the iron flowers and broken stone garden pieces to see if he had been wrong in his judgment. After a while he felt he hadn’t been.

  He was staring at the dwarf tree when the door opened and Rubin, wearing his railroad engineer’s cap, in astonishment entered.

  “It’s a beautiful sculpture,” Arkin got out, “the best in the room I’d say.”

  Rubin stared at him in flushed anger, his face lean; he had grown long reddish sideburns. His eyes were for once green rather than gray. His mouth worked nervously but he said nothing.

  “Excuse me, Rubin, I came in to tell you I got those hats I mentioned to you some time ago mixed up.”

  “Damn right you did.”

  “Also for letting things get out of hand for a while.”

  “Damn right.”

  Rubin, though he tried not to, then began to cry. He wept silently, his shoulders shaking, tears seeping through his coarse fingers on his face. Arkin had taken off.

  They stopped avoiding each other and spoke pleasantly when they met, which wasn’t often. One day Arkin, when he went into the men’s room, saw Rubin regarding himself in the mirror in his white cap, the one that seemed to resemble Rembrandt’s hat. He wore it like a crown of failure and hope.

  1973

  A Wig

  Ida was an energetic, competent woman of fifty, healthy, still attractive. Thinking of herself, she touched her short hair. What’s fifty? One more than forty-nine. She had been married at twenty and had a daughter, Amy, who was twenty-eight and not a satisfied person. Of satisfying, Ida thought: She has no serious commitment. She wanders in her life. From childhood she has wandered off the track, where I can’t begin to predict. Amy had recently left the man she was living with, in his apartment, and was again back at home. “He doesn’t connect,” Amy said. “Why should it take you two years to learn such a basic thing?” Ida asked. “I’m a slow learner,” Amy said. “I learn slowly.” She worked for an importer who thought highly of her though she wouldn’t sleep with him.

  As Amy walked out of the room where she had stood talking with her mother, she stopped to arrange some flowers in a vase, six tight roses a woman friend had sent her on her birthday, a week ago. Amy deeply breathed in the decaying fragrance, then shut her door. Ida was a widow who worked three days a week in a sweater boutique. While talking to Amy she had been thinking about her hair. She doubted that Amy noticed how seriously she was worried; or if she did, that it moved her.

  When she was a young woman, Ida, for many years, had worn a tight bun held together by three celluloid hairpins. Martin, her husband, who was later to fall dead of a heart attack, liked buns and topknots. “They are sane yet sexy,” he said. Ida wore her bun until she began to lose hair in her mid-forties. She noticed the hair coming loose when she brushed it with her ivory-topped brush. One day the increasing number of long hairs left in the comb frightened her. And when she examined her hairline in the mirror, it seemed to Ida that her temples were practically bare.

  “I think the tight bun contributes to my loss of hair,” she told Martin. “Maybe I ought to get rid of it?”

  “Nonsense,” he had said. “If anything, the cause would be hormonal.”

  “So what would you advise me to do?” Ida looked up at him uneasily. He was a wiry man with wavy, graying hair and a strong neck.

  “In the first place, don’t wash it so often. You wash it too often.”

  “My hair has always been oily. I have to shampoo it at least twice a week.”

  “Le
ss often,” Martin advised, “take my tip.”

  “Martin, I am very afraid.”

  “You don’t have to be,” he said, “it’s a common occurrence.”

  One day, while walking on Third Avenue, Ida had passed a wigmaker’s shop and peered into the window. There were men’s and women’s wigs on abstract, elegant wooden heads. One or two were reasonably attractive; most were not.

  How artificial they are, Ida thought. I could never wear such a thing.

  She felt for the wigs a mild hatred she tied up with the fear of losing her hair. If I buy a wig, people will know why. It’s none of their business.

  Ida continued her brisk walk on Third Avenue. Although it was midsummer, she stepped into a hat shop and bought herself a fall hat, a wide-brimmed felt with a narrow, bright green ribbon. Amy had green eyes.

  One morning after Ida had washed her hair in the bathroom sink, and a wet, coiled mass of it slid down the drain, she was shocked and felt faint. After she had dried her hair, as she gently combed it, close to the mirror, she was greatly concerned by the sight of her pink scalp more than ever visible on top of her head. But Martin, after inspecting it, had doubted it was all that noticeable. Of course her hair was thinner than it had been—whose wasn’t?—but he said he noticed nothing unusual, especially now that she had cut her hair and was wearing bangs. Ida wore a short, swirled haircut. She shampooed her hair less frequently.

  And she went to a dermatologist, who prescribed an emulsion he had concocted, with alcohol, distilled water, and some drops of castor oil, which she was to shake well before applying. He instructed her to rub the mixture into her scalp with a piece of cotton. “That’ll stir it up.” The dermatologist had first suggested an estrogen salve applied topically, but Ida said she didn’t care for estrogen.