The Collected Stories

by Leonard Michaels

  EATING OUT

  Four men were at the table next to mine. Their collars were open, their ties loose, and their jackets hung on the wall. One man poured dressing on the salad, another tossed the leaves. Another filled the plates and served. One tore bread, another poured wine, another ladled soup. The table was small and square. The men were cramped, but efficient nonetheless, apparently practiced at eating here, this way, hunched over food, heads striking to suck at spoons, tear at forks, then pulling back into studious, invincible mastication. Their lower faces slid and chopped; they didn’t talk once. All their eyes, like birds on a wire, perched on a horizontal line above the action. Swallowing muscles flickered in jaws and necks. Had I touched a shoulder and asked for the time, there would have been snarling, a flash of teeth.

  WHAT’S NEW

  My mother said, “So? What’s new?” I said, “Something happened.” She said, “I knew it. I had a feeling. I could tell. Why did I ask? Sure, something happened. Why couldn’t I sit still? Did I have to ask? I had a feeling. I knew, I knew. What happened?”

  THE BURGLAR

  I dialed. The burglar answered and said Ikstein wasn’t home. I said tell him I called. The burglar laughed. I said, “What’s funny?” The burglar said, “This is a coincidence. When you called I was reading a passage in Ikstein’s diary which is about you.” I said, “Tell me what it says.” The burglar snorted: “Your request is compromising. Just hearing it is compromising.” I said, “I’m in the apartment below Ikstein’s. We can easily meet and have a little talk about my request. I’ll bring something to drink. Do you like marijuana? I know where Ikstein hides his marijuana. I have money with me, also a TV set and a Japanese camera. It’s no trouble for me to carry everything up there. One trip.” He said if I came upstairs he would kill me.

  LIKE IRONY

  He pried me open and disappeared inside, made me urinate, defecate, and screech, then slapped my dossier shut, stuck it in his cabinet, slammed drawer, swallowed key. “Well,” he said, “how have you been?” I said, “Actually, that’s what I’m here to find out.” He said,“People have feelings. They do their best. Some of us say things to people — such as you — in a way that is like irony, but it isn’t irony. It’s good breeding, manners, tact — we have delicate intentions.” I apologized. “So,” he said, “tell me your plans.” I said, “Now that I know?” “That’s right,” he said, “I’m delighted that you aren’t very stupid.”

  ONE THING

  Ikstein played harpsichord music on the phonograph and opened a bottle of wine. I said, “Let’s be frank, Ikstein. There’s too much crap in this world.” He said, “Sure.” The harpsichord was raving ravished Bach. Windows were open. The breeze smelled of reasons to live. I told him I didn’t care for love. Only women, only their bodies. Talk, dance, conversation — I could do it — but I cared about one thing only. When it was finished, I had to go. Anyhow, I said, generally speaking, women can’t stand themselves. Generally speaking, I thought they were right. “How about you, Ikstein?” He made a pleased mouth and said, “I love women, the way they look, talk, dress, and think. I love their hips, necks, breasts, and ankles. But I hate cunts.” He stamped the floor. I raised my glass. He raised his. “To life,” I said.

  MALE

  She was asleep. I wondered if I ought to read a newspaper. Nobody phoned. I wanted to run around the block until I dropped dead, but I was afraid of the muggers. I picked up the phone, dialed Ikstein, decided to hang up, but he answered: “This is Ikstein.” I said, “Can I come up?” He said nothing. I said, “Ikstein, it’s very late, but I can hear your TV.” He said, “When I turn it off, I’ll throw you out.” I grabbed my cigarettes. His door was open. He didn’t say hello. We watched a movie, drank beer, smoked. Side by side, hissing gases, insular and simpatico. It was male. I farted. He scratched his scalp, belched, tipped back in his chair with his legs forked out. His bathrobe fell apart, showing the vascular stump. It became a shivering mushroom, then a moon tree waving in the milky flicker. He said, “Well, look who wants to watch the movie.” I said, “Hang a shoe on it.” He refolded his robe and flicked off the TV. “If you decide to come out,” he said, “let me be the first to know. Now go away.” I went downstairs, sat on the bed, and put my hand on her belly. She whimpered, belly falling under my palm. She was asleep. I felt like a crazy man.

  DIXIE

  “Richard Ikstein” was printed on his mailbox. His nighttime visitors called him “Dixie.” In every accent, American and foreign, sometimes laughing, sometimes grim. When he fell our ceiling shuddered. Flakes of paint drifted down onto our bed. She hugged me and tried to make conversation: “They’re the last romantics.” He was pleading for help. “If you like romance so much,” I said, “why don’t you become a whore.” I twisted away, snapped on the radio, found a voice, and made it loud enough to interfere with his pleading. We couldn’t hear his words, only sobs and whimpers. By the time he stopped falling, our bed was gritty with paint and plaster dust. We were too tired to get up and slap the sheets clean. In the morning I saw blood on our pillows. “It’s on your face, too,” she said. “You slept on your back.” I was for liberation of every kind, but I dressed in silent, tight-ass fury and ran upstairs. “Look at my face, Ikstein,” I shouted, banging at his door. It opened. The police were dragging him to a stretcher. I showed them my stained ceiling and bloody pillows. Obvious, but I had to explain. I told them about Ikstein’s visitors, how he pleaded and sobbed. The police took notes. She cried when they left. She cried all morning. “The state is the greatest human achievement,” I said. “Hegel is right. The state is the only human achievement.” She said, “If you like the state so much, why don’t you become a cop.”

  CRABS

  My mother didn’t mention the way things looked and said there was going to be a bar mitzvah. If I came to it, the relatives “could see” and I could meet her old friends from Miami. Their daughter was a college graduate, beautiful, money up the sunny gazoo. Moreover, it was a double-rabbi affair, one for the Hebrew, one for English. “Very classy,” she said. I had been to such affairs. A paragraph of Hebrew is followed by a paragraph of English. The Hebrew sounds like an interruption. Like jungle talk. I hated the organ music, the hidden choirs, the opulent halls. Besides, I had the crabs. I wasn’t in the mood for a Miami bitch who probably had gonorrhea. I said, “No.” She said, “Where are your values?”

  SMILE

  In memoriam I recalled his smile, speedy and horizontal, the corners fleeing one another as if to meet in the back of his head. It suggested pain, great difficulties, failure, gleaming life rot. A smile of “Nevertheless.” Sometimes we met on the stairs. He’d smile, yet seem to want to dash the other way, slide into the wall, creep by with no hello. But he smiled. “Nevertheless,” he smiled. I would try to seem calm, innocuous, nearly dead. That made him more nevertheless. I would tell him something unfortunate about myself — how I’d overdrawn my checking account, lost my wallet, discovered a boil on my balls — and I would laugh at his selfconsciously self-conscious, funny remarks. He nodded gratefully, but he didn’t believe I thought he was funny. He didn’t believe he was funny. I thought about the murder of complex persons. I thought about his smile, bleeding, beaten to death.

  RIGHT NUMBER

  A girl lived in the apartment below. We became friends. I’d go there any time, early or late. She opened the door and didn’t turn on the light. I undressed in darkness, slid in beside her, made a spoon, and she slid into my spoon. She had no work, nothing she had to do, no one expected her to be anyplace. Money came to her in the mail. She had a body like Goya’s whore and a Botticelli face. She was tall, pale, blond, and wavy. I knocked, she let me in. No questions. We talked fast and moved about from bed to chairs to floor. Sometimes I’d pinch her thigh. Once she knocked a coffee cup into my lap. Finally we had sexual intercourse. We made a lot of jokes and she was on her back. I tried to be gentle. She thrashed in a complimentary way and moaned. Later she said to guess how m
any men she’d had. I said ten. She said fifteen. How does that sound? It sounds more depraved than I feel. After the Turk, she understood the Ottoman Empire. She said people thought of her as manic-depressive. But it wasn’t true. She had good reasons for what she feels. Germans are friskier than you’d imagine. The right number is seven or eight. It sounds like a lot, yet it isn’t depraved. It’s believable. A girl shouldn’t say seven or eight, then describe twenty. What if I said more than ten, less than twenty? How does that sound? Six came in one weekend. They count as one. How old do you think I am? Twenty-eight? I’m only twenty-two. With A, it is a way of making something out of nothing. With B, it is a form of conversation. With C, it is letting him believe something about himself. With D, it is a mistake. I’ve had seventeen. People think I’ve had fifty or a hundred. Do I want fifty or a hundred? No. I want twenty-five. Twenty-five or thirty. Do you remember what my face is like? I think it looks sluttish. Indians are the nicest. Blacks don’t talk to you afterward. I was raped when I was a kid. Then I rode my bicycle around and around the block and talked to myself in a loud voice. All my life I’ve tried to keep things from getting out of hand, but I get out of hand. Nothing works. Nothing works. I like you very very much, I said, let’s try again. I was gentle. She thrashed in a complimentary way and moaned. The next day she knocked at my door, wearing a handsome gray wool suit and high heels. Her hair had been washed and combed into a style. She looked neat, intelligent, and extremely beautiful. She said she was going to a job interview to have something to do. We hugged for good luck and kissed. Somehow she was on her back. We had sexual intercourse. I wasn’t gentle. She whipped in the pelvis and screamed murder. Me, too.

  ANIMALS

  Her skin was made of animals, exceedingly tiny, compressed like a billion paps in a breathing sponge. Caressing her, my palm was caressed by the smooth resilient motion in her skin. Awake or asleep, angry, bored, loving, made no difference. Her skin was superior to attitudes or words. It implied the most beautiful girl. And the core of my pleasure ached for her, the one she implied.

  GOD

  My mother said, “What’s new?” I said, “Nothing.” She said, “What? You can tell me. Tell me what’s new.” I said, “Something happened.” She said, “I had a feeling. I could tell. What happened?” I said, “Nothing happened.” She said, “Thank God.”

  HIS CERTAIN WAY

  Ikstein had a certain way of picking up a spoon, asking for the time, getting down the street from here to there. He would pick up his spoon in his certain way, stick it in the soup, lift it to his mouth, stop, then whisper, “Eat, eat, little Ikily.” Everything he did was in his certain way. He made an impression of making an impression. I remembered it. I remembered Ikstein. It was no different to remember than to see the living Ikstein, in his certain little ways. For me, he never died. He lived where he always lived, in my impression of Ikstein. I could bring him back any time, essentially, for me. “Eat, eat, little Ikily.” When he did his work — he was a book and movie reviewer — he always made himself a “nice” bowl of soup. It sat beside his typewriter. He typed a sentence, stopped, said, “Now I’ll have a tasty sip of soup.” Essentially, for me, Ikstein had no other life. If he had in fact another life, it was never available for me. I could not pretend to regret it was no longer available for him. “Oh, poor Ikstein” would mean “Oh, poor me, what I have lost. The sights and sound of Ikstein.” I lost nothing. His loss, I couldn’t appreciate. Neither could he. So I remembered Ikstein and felt no sorrow. I mentioned somebody who had married for the second time. “His second wife looks like the first,” I said. “As if he were pursuing something.” In his certain way, Ikstein said, “Or as if it were pursuing him.” Thus, even his mind lived. I said, “My intention was modest, a bit of chitchat, a germ of sense. I wasn’t hoping, when I have a headache and feel sick and unable to think, to illuminate the depths. Must you be such a prick, Ikstein?”

  MOURNFUL GIRLS

  Busy naked heels, a rush of silky things, elastic snaps, clicks, a rattle of beads, hangers clinking, humming, her quick consistent breathing as the mattress dipped. Lips touched mine. Paper cracked flat near my head. Wooden heel shafts knocked in the hallway. I opened my eyes. A ten-dollar bill lay on the pillow. I got up, dressed, stuck the bill in my pocket, went to the apartment below, and asked, “Do you want anything?” She said no. She lay on the bed. On the way back I picked up her mail. “Some letters,” I said, and dropped them beside her. She lay on the bed, skirt twisted about her hips and belly, blouse open, bra unhooked to ease the spill. Her blanket was smooth. I whispered, “Mona, Melanie, Mildred, Sarah, Nora, Dora, Sadie.” She whispered, “Mournful girls.” I lost the beginning of the next sentence before I heard the end. She heard as much, glanced at me, quit talking. We undressed. I tugged her off the bed to the mirror. I looked at her. She looked at me. Our arms slipped around them. All had sexual intercourse. I was upstairs when she returned from work. She asked, “Why didn’t you go to the grocery?” I said, “It will take five minutes,” and dashed out. The street was dark, figures appeared and jerked by. In the grocery I couldn’t find the ten-dollar bill. It wasn’t in my pockets. It wasn’t on the floor. I ran back along the street, neck bent like a dog’s, inspecting the flux of cigarette butts, candy wrappers, spittle plops, dog piss, beer cans, broken glass, granular pavement — then remembered — and ran upstairs quietly. She lay on the bed. The milk and meat were warm, butter loose and greasy. Everything except the cream cheese was in the bag beside her bed. She lay on the bed, gnawing cream cheese through the foil. “You should have put the bag in the refrigerator,” I said. She gnawed. “It would have been simple to put the bag in the refrigerator,” I said. “Shut your hole,” she said. I shoved her hand. Cream cheese smeared her nostrils. She lay in the bed, slack, still, breathing through her mouth, as if she wouldn’t cry and was not crying. I took the bag of groceries and went upstairs. The table was set. She was sweeping the kitchen floor, crying.

  THE HAND

  I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, “Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you.” I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps.

  ALL RIGHT

  “I don’t mind variations,” she said, “but this feels wrong.” I said,“It feels all right to me.” She said, “To you, wrong is right.” I said, “I didn’t say right, I said all right.” “Big difference,” she said. I said, “Yes, I’m critical. My mind never stops. To me almost everything is always wrong. My standard is pleasure. To me, this is all right.” She said, “To me it stinks.” I said, “What do you like?” She said, “Like I don’t like. I’m not interested in being superior to my sensations. I won’t live long enough for all right.”

  MA

  I said, “Ma, do you know what happened?” She said, “Oh my God.”

  NAKED

  Ugly or plain she would have had fewer difficulties cultivating an attractive personality or restricting sex to cortex, but she was so nearly physically perfect as to appear, more than anything, not perfect. Not ugly, not plain, then strikingly not perfect made her also not handsome and not at all sentimentally appealing. In brief, what she was she wasn’t, a quality salient in adumbration, unpossessed. She lived a bad metaphor, like the Devil, unable to assimilate paradox to personal life, being no artist and not a religious, suffering spasms of self-loathing in the lonely, moral night. Finally, she smacked a Coke bottle on the rim of the bathtub, mutilated her wrist, then phoned the cops. So clumsy, yet her dinner parties were splendid, prepared at unbelievable speed. She hated to cook. Chewing gum, cigarettes, candy, drugs, alcohol, and taxicabs took her from Monday to Friday. The ambulance attendant — big ironical black man in baggy white trousers — flipped open the medicine cabinet and yelled, “See those barbiturates. You didn’t have to make a mess.” He dragged her out of the tub by the hair,
naked, bleeding. She considered all that impressive, but if I responded to her with a look or tone, she detected my feelings before I did and made them manifest, like a trout slapped out of water by a bear. “You admire my eyes? How about my ass?” I thrilled to her acuity. But exactly then she’d become a stupid girl loosening into sexual mood, and then, then, if I touched her she offered total sprawl, whimpering, “Call me dirty names.” I tried to think of her as a homosexual person, not a faggot. She begged me to wear her underpants and walk on my knees. When I demurred, she pissed on the sheets. “You don’t love me,” she said. “What a waste getting involved with you.” Always playing with her flashy, raglike scar, sliding it along the tendons like a watchband.

  BETTER

  I phoned and said, “I feel good, even wonderful. Everything is great. It’s been this way for months and it’s getting better. Better, better, better. How are you, Ma?” She said, “Me?” I said, “Yes, how are you?” “Me?” she said. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  Getting Lucky

  LIEBOWITZ MAKES his head out of cigarettes and coffee, goes to the West Side subway, stands in a screaming iron box, and begins to drift between shores of small personal misery and fantastic sex, but this morning he felt fingers and, immediately, the flow of his internal life forked into dialogue between himself — standing man who lived too much blind from the chest down — and the other, a soft inquisitive spider pinching the tongue of his zipper, dragging it toward the iron floor that boomed in the bones of his rooted feet, boomed in his legs, and boomed through his unzipped fly. Thus, with no how-do-you-do, Liebowitz was in the hand of an invisible stranger. Forty-second Street, the next stop, was minutes away. Liebowitz tried to look around. Was everyone groping everyone else? Fads in Manhattan spread to millions. Liebowitz didn’t care to make a fuss, distinguish himself with a cranky, strictly personal statement. He tried to be objective, to look around, see what’s what in the IRT. On his left, he saw a Negro woman with a tired sullen profile and a fat neck the color of liver. Directly ahead he saw a white man’s pale earlobe dangling amid the ravages of a mastoid operation, behind the tension lines of an incipient scowl; his sentiment of being. Against Liebowitz’s back were the pillars of indeterminate architecture; palpable and democratic weight. On his right, steeped in a miasma of deodorants and odorants, stood a high school girl. Thick white makeup, black eyeliner, and lipstick-blotched mouth, which, in the sticky puddle of surrounding skin, seemed to suck and drink her face. Her hair, bleached scraggle, hung. She stared up at an advertisement for suntan lotion, reading and reading and reading, as if it were a letter from God. Telling her perhaps, thought Liebowitz, to wash the crap off her face. Her blotch hung open. She breathed through eight little teeth.