The Collected Stories

by Leonard Michaels

  People thought it was a grand story. Henry looked at me till his eyes went click and his mouth resolved into a sneer.

  “Ever get a headache in this spot?” he asked, tapping the back of his head.

  “Sometimes,” I answered, leaning toward him and smiling.

  “Then look out. It’s a bad sign. It means you’ve got a slipped disc and probably need an operation. They might have to cut your head off.”

  Everyone laughed, though no one more than I. Then I got a headache and trembled for an hour. Henry wanted me to have a slipped disc.

  Such a man was a threat to the world, and public denunciation was in order. I considered beginning work on a small tract about evil, personified by Henry. But I really had nothing to say. He had done me no injury. My dream, however, was obviously the truth: he wanted to kill me. Perhaps, inadvertently, I had said or done something to insult him. A gentleman, says Lord Chesterfield, never unintentionally insults anyone. But I didn’t fancy myself a gentleman. Perhaps there was some aspect of my character he thought ghastly. After all, you may know a person for centuries before discovering a hideous peculiarity in him. I considered changing my character, but I didn’t know how or what to change. It was perplexing. Henry’s character was vile, so I would change mine. I hadn’t ever thought his character was vile before. Now, all I had to do was think: Henry. Vile, oh vile, vile. It would require a revolution in me. Better that than lose a friend. No; better to be yourself and proud. Tell Henry to go to hell. But a real friend goes to hell himself. One afternoon, on my way to hell, I turned a corner and was face to face with Marjorie. She stopped and smiled. Behind her I could see flames. Fluttering down the wind came the sound of prayer.

  There was no reason to run. I stood absolutely rigid. She blushed, looked down, and said hello. My right hand whispered the same, then twitched and spun around. It slipped from the end of my arm like a leaf from a bough. She asked how I had been. My feet clattered off in opposite directions. I smiled and asked her how she had been. Before she might answer anything social and ordinary, a groan flew up my throat. My teeth couldn’t resist its force and it was suddenly in the air. Both of us marveled, though I more than she. She was too polite to make anything of it and suggested we stroll. The groan hovered behind us, growing smaller and more contorted. While she talked of the last few months, I nodded at things I approved of. I approved of everything and nodded without cease until my head fell off. She looked away as I groped for it on the ground and put it back on, shouting hello, hello.

  How could I have been so blind, so careless, cruel, and stupid? This was a lovely girl. I, beast and fool, adjusting my head, felt now what I should have felt then. And I felt that Henry was marvelous. “Seen any movies lately?” I asked.

  She stuttered something about a movie and Henry’s impressions of it. The stutter was worse than I remembered, and now that I looked her face seemed thin, the flesh gray. In her effort not to stutter, strain showed in her neck. As if it were my habitual right, I took her hand. She continued to stutter something Henry had said about the movie, and didn’t snap her hand back. Tears formed in my nose. “Thank you,” I whispered. “F-for what?” she asked. We were near an empty lot. I turned abruptly against her, my lips quivering. She said, “Really, Phillip, I d-don’t w-want …” With a rapid hand I discovered that she wore no underpants. We fell together. I caught sight of her later as she sprinted into the darkness. Groans issued from my mouth. They flew after her like a flock of bats.

  It was a week before Henry came to see me, but I was certain I had heard the bell a hundred times. Each time, I put out my cigarette and dragged to the door, ready for a punch in the face, a knife, or a bullet. In the middle of the night, I found myself sitting up in bed, my eyes large and compendious with dark as I shouted, “No, Henry, no.” Though I shouted, I had resolved to say nothing or little when he finally came. Not a word would shape my mouth if I could help it. A word would be an excuse. Even self-denunciation was beyond decent possibility. If he flung acid in my face, I would fall and say, “Thanks.” If he were out in the hall with a gun and fired point blank into my stomach, I might, as I toppled, blood sloshing through my lips, beg forgiveness. Though I merited no such opportunity, I hoped there would be time for it. If I could, while begging, keep my eyes fixed on him, it would be nice.

  After three days passed and he still hadn’t come, I thought of hanging myself. I tied a rope to the lightbulb, made a noose, and set a chair under it. But I couldn’t, when I experimented, manage to open the door and then dash to the chair and hang myself without looking clumsy, as if I were really asking to be stopped. On the other hand, I didn’t want to practice, become graceful, and look effete. I considered poison: open the door, hello, down it goes, goodbye. Or fire: set myself on fire and shrivel, spitting curses on my head.

  Despite all this I slept well most of the week, and on several nights I dreamed of Marjorie. We did it every time. “Is this the nature of sin?” I asked. “This is nature,” she said. “Don’t talk.” I discovered a truth in these dreams: each of my feelings was much like another, pity like lust, hate like love, sorrow like joy. I wondered if there were people who could keep them neat. I supposed not. They were feelings and not to be managed. If I felt bad I felt good. That was that.

  The idea made me smile. When I noticed myself smiling, I chuckled a bit, and soon I was cackling. Tears streamed out of my eyes. I had to lie on the floor to keep from sinking there. I lay for a long time digging my nails into my cheeks and thought about the nature of ideas. Pascal, Plato, Freud. I felt kin to men like that. Having ideas, seized as it were. I had had an idea.

  When I heard the doorbell I knew immediately that I had heard it. The ring was different from the phony ringing during the week. It was substantial, moral, piercing. It set me running to answer, dashing between tables and chairs, leaping a sofa, lunging down the hall to come flying to the ringing door, where I swerved and came back to where I had been. A voice more primitive than any noise the body makes, said:

  “Let the son of a bitch ring.”

  My lips slid up my teeth, my ears flattened to the skull. I found myself crouching. Muscles bunched in my shoulders. I felt a shuddering stiffness in my thighs. Tight as bow strings, tendons curled the bones of my hands to claws. The bell continued to ring, and a hot, ragged tongue slapped across my muzzle. I smelled the sweet horror of my breath. It bristled my neck and sent me gliding low to the ringing door, a noiseless animal, blacker and more secret than night.

  Henry out there stood dying in his shoes, ringing in gruesome demise. My paws lifted and lopped down softly. Blood poured me, slow as steaming tar, inevitably toward the door. My paw lay on the knob. It turned. I tugged. Nothing happened. He rang. I shouted, “Can’t open it. Give a shove.” I tugged, Henry shoved. I twisted the knob and he flung himself against the other side. A panel dislodged. I had a glimpse of his face, feverish and shining. A blaze of white teeth cut the lower half. The door stayed shut. We yelled to one another.

  “All right. Give it everything.”

  “Here we go.”

  The door opened.

  Henry stood in the hall, looking straight into my eyes. The crooked nose, the blue eyes. The physical man. Nothing I felt, absolutely nothing, could accommodate the fact of him. I wondered if it was actually Henry, and I looked rapidly about his face, casting this and that aside like a man fumbling through his wallet for his driver’s license while the trooper grimly waits. Nothing turned up to name him Henry. Even the familiar tooth left me unimpressed. Henry’s features made no more sense than a word repeated fifty times. The physical man, Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry. Nothing. I wanted to cry and beg him to be Henry again, but only snickered and stepped back. He came inside. I took a package of cigarettes from my pocket and offered it to him. He stared, then shook his head. The movement was trivial, but it was no. No! It startled me into sense. I put the cigarettes back into my pocket and sighed. The breath ran out slowly, steadily, like sand through an hou
rglass. This was it. He followed with a sigh of his own, then said, “I guess this is it.”

  “I guess,” I murmured, “it is.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it is,” and took a long, deep breath, as if drawing up the air I had let out.

  I began to strangle. Neither of us spoke. I coughed. He cleared his throat in a sympathetic reflex. I coughed. He cleared his throat once more. I coughed a third time, and he waited for me to stop, but I continued to cough. I was barely able to see, though my eyes bulged. He asked if I wanted a glass of water. I nodded and doubled forward wiping my bulging eyes. When he returned with the water I seized it and drank. He asked if I wanted another glass. I said, “No thanks,” coughed again, a rasping, rotten-chested hack. He rushed for another glass. I saw it trembling in his hand. His sleeve was wet to the elbow. “Thanks,” I said, and seized it.

  “Go on, go on, drink.”

  I drank.

  “Finish it,” he urged.

  I finished it slowly.

  “You ought to sit down.”

  I went to a chair and sat down. My head rolled in a dull, feeble way, and a moment passed in silence. Then he said:

  “There has been enough of this.”

  I stood up instantly.

  He looked at me hard. I tried to look back equally hard, as if his look were an order that I do the same. His height and sharp little eyes gave him the advantage. “Yes,” I said, shaking my head yes.

  “Months of it. Enough!”

  “I’m responsible,” I muttered, and that put force into my look. “All my fault,” I said, force accumulating.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t blame you for anything. You want to kill me and I don’t blame you for that. I’m no friend. I betrayed you.”

  “Kill you?”

  “I came here expecting death. I am determined to settle for nothing less.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Absurd? Is it so absurd to want justice? Is it so absurd to ask the friend one has betrayed to do for one the only possible thing that will purge one?”

  He moved an inch closer and seemed to be restraining himself, with terrific difficulty, from moving closer.

  “Shut up, Henry,” I said. “I have no intention of killing you and I never wanted to do such a thing.”

  “Ha! I see now.”

  “You don’t see a thing, Henry.”

  “I see,” he shouted, and slapped his head. “I see why you refuse to do it, why you pretend you don’t even want to do it.”

  He slapped his head again very hard.

  “I see, Phillip, you’re a moral genius. By not killing me you administer cruel, perfect justice.”

  “Henry, get a hold of yourself. Be fair to both of us, will you.”

  “Don’t hand me that liberal crap, Phillip. Don’t talk to me about fair. You be fair. Do the right thing, the merciful thing. Kill me, Phillip.”

  I started backing toward the door, my hands stuffed deep between my lowest ribs. Henry shuffled after me, his little eyes wild with fury and appreciation. “No use. I will follow you until you show mercy. I will bring you guns and knives and ropes, vats of poison, acids, gasoline and matches. I will leap in front of your car. I will …”

  Whirling suddenly, I was out the door. Henry gasped and followed, tearing for a grip on the back of my head. We went down the night, Henry ripping out fists of my flying hair and jamming them into his mouth so he might choke. The night became day, and day night. These a week, the week a month. My hair was soon gone from the back of my head. When it grew in he ripped it out again. The wind lacerated our faces and tore the clothes off our bodies. Occasionally, I heard him scream, “I have a gun. Shoot me.” Or, “A rope, Phillip. Strangle me.” I had a step on him always and I ran on powerful legs. Over the running years, they grew more powerful. They stretched and swelled to the size of trees while my body shrank and my head descended. At last my arms disappeared and I was a head on legs. Running.

  The Deal

  TWENTY WERE JAMMED TOGETHER ON THE STOOP; tiers of heads made one central head, and the wings rested along the banisters: a raggedy monster of boys studying her approach. Her white face and legs. She passed without looking, poked her sunglasses against the bridge of her nose, and tucked her bag between her arm and ribs. She carried it at her hip like a rifle stock. On her spine forty eyes hung like poison berries. Bone dissolved beneath her lank beige silk, and the damp circle of her belt cut her in half. Independent legs struck toward the points of her shoes. Her breasts lifted and rode the air like porpoises. She would cross to the grocery as usual, buy cigarettes, then cross back despite their eyes. As if the neighborhood hadn’t changed one bit. She slipped the bag forward to crack it against her belly and pluck out keys and change. In the gesture she was home from work. Her keys jangled in the sun as if they opened everything and the air received her. The monster, watching, saw the glove fall away.

  Pigeons looped down to whirl between buildings, and a ten-wheel truck came slowly up the street. As it passed she emerged from the grocery, then stood at the curb opposite the faces. She glanced along the street where she had crossed it. No glove. Tar reticulated between the cobbles. A braid of murky water ran against the curb, twisting bits of flotsam toward the drain. She took off her sunglasses, dropped them with her keys into the bag, then stepped off the curb toward the faces. Addressing them with a high, friendly voice, she said, “Did you guys see a glove? I dropped it a moment ago.”

  The small ones squinted up at her from the bottom step. On the middle steps sat boys fourteen or fifteen years old. The oldest ones made the wings. Dandies and introverts, they sprawled, as if with a common corruption in their bones. In the center, his eyes level with hers, a boy waited for her attention in the matter of gloves. To his right sat a very thin boy with a pocked face. A narrow-brimmed hat tipped toward his nose and shaded the continuous activity of his eyes. She spoke to the green eyes of the boy in the center and held up the glove she had: “Like this.”

  Teeth appeared below the hat, then everywhere as the boys laughed. Did she hold up a fish? Green eyes said, “Hello, Miss Calile.”

  She looked around at the faces, then laughed with them at her surprise. “You know my name?”

  “I see it on the mailbox,” said the hat. “He can’t read. I see it.”

  “My name is Duke Francisco,” said the illiterate.

  “My name is Abbe Carlyle,” she said to him.

  The hat smirked. “His name Francisco Lopez.”

  Green eyes turned to the hat. “Shut you mouth, baby. I tell her my name, not you.”

  “His name Francisco Lopez,” the hat repeated.

  She saw pocks and teeth, the thin oily face, and the hat, as he spoke again, nicely to her: “My name Francisco Pacheco, the Prince. I seen you name on the mailbox.”

  “Did either of you …”

  “You name is shit,” said green eyes to the hat.

  “My name is Tito.” A small one on the bottom step looked up for the effect of his name. She looked down at him. “I am Tito,” he said.

  “Did you see my glove, Tito?”

  “This is Tomato,” he answered, unable to bear her attention. He nudged the boy to his left. Tomato nudged back, stared at the ground.

  “I am happy to know you, Tito,” she said, “and you, Tomato. Both of you.” She looked back up to green eyes and the hat. The hat acknowledged her courtesy. He tilted back to show her his eyes, narrow and black except for bits of white reflected in the corners. His face was thin, highboned, and fragile. She pitied the riddled skin.

  “This guy,” he said, pointing his thumb to the right, “is Monkey,” and then to the left beyond green eyes, “and this guy is Beans.” She nodded to the hat, then Monkey, then Beans, measuring the respect she offered, doling it out in split seconds. Only one of them had the glove.

  “Well, did any of you guys see my glove?”

  Every tier grew still, like birds in a tree waiting for a sign that would move th
em all at once.

  Tito’s small dark head snapped forward. She heard the slap an instant late. The body lurched after the head and pitched off the stoop at her feet. She saw green eyes sitting back slowly. Tito gaped up at her from the concrete. A sacrifice to the lady. She stepped back as if rejecting it and frowned at green eyes. He gazed indifferently at Tito, who was up, facing him with coffee-bean fists. Tito screamed, “I tell her you got it, dickhead.”

  The green eyes swelled in themselves like a light blooming in the ocean. Tito’s fists opened, he turned, folded quickly, and sat back into the mass. He began to rub his knees.

  “May I have my glove, Francisco?” Her voice was still pleasant and high. She now held her purse in the crook of her arm and pressed it against her side.

  Some fop had a thought and giggled in the wings. She glanced up at him immediately. He produced a toothpick. With great delicacy he stuck it into his ear. She looked away. Green eyes again waited for her. A cup of darkness formed in the hollow that crowned his chestbone. His soiled gray polo shirt hooked below it. “You think I have you glove?” She didn’t answer. He stared between his knees, between heads and shoulders to the top of Tito’s head. “Hey, Tito, you tell her I got the glove?”

  “I didn’t tell nothing,” muttered Tito, rubbing his knees harder as if they were still bitter from his fall.

  “He’s full of shit, Miss Calile. I break his head later. What kind of glove you want?”

  “This kind,” she said wearily, “a white glove like this.”

  “Too hot.” He grinned.

  “Yes, too hot, but I need it.”

  “What for? Too hot.” He gave her full green concern.

  “It’s much too hot, but the glove is mine, mister.”

  She rested her weight on one leg and wiped her brow with the glove she had. They watched her do it, the smallest of them watched her, and she moved the glove slowly to her brow again and drew it down her cheek and neck. She could think of nothing to say, nothing to do without expressing impatience. Green eyes changed the subject. “You live there.” He pointed toward her building.