The Collected Stories

by Leonard Michaels

  Jack I said it was a shoe. You should throw Goethe out the window. Maybe you’re in the Mongolian mood to throw my other shoe out the window? I slapped it on his bed.

  He threw it out the window.

  How about this lamp I said.

  Out the window.

  These blankets you want to keep?

  Out the window.

  I said this is too big don’t even look at it.

  For a Chinese Jew the mattress was no trouble.

  A nurse came in when I was pulling Jack’s bed toward the window. She started hitting and scratching me. Jack knocked her down with a punch. I jumped on her face. Jack put his tongue in her wallet, then me, then we pushed the bed out the window.

  We were singing ya-ya-ya when nurses and doctors from all over the hospital came in. Why not? How often do schmucks see a friendship?

  I walked home without a shoe. Not one shoe. I begged myself to take a taxi. It’s cold. It’s snowing. Take a taxi. But I refused. No taxi. For proof I yelled taxi taxi. It stopped. Drive into a wall I said.

  The driver looked at me. I made a Jack face. He picked up a wrench. I could see he was a maniac. I was standing without shoes and a maniac was coming with a wrench. He could hit me in the foot. When he pushed open the door another taxi knocked it off.

  It figures I yelled. But he was hitting the other driver with the wrench. In the snow I ran away. You’ll get pneumonia I said.

  I said I hope it’s a virus.

  Then I saw a phone booth and called Jack’s wife.

  She said hello.

  I recognized her voice because it was so little and quiet. That’s how she talked. Like a one-year-old.

  I said hello Jack’s wife?

  She said yeah Jack’s wife.

  I said Jack is dead.

  She said what who?

  I said you’re no good believe me. East Side hospital.

  She was screaming with her little voice what who?

  I didn’t say anything. I said I’m hanging up. You think my foot isn’t killing me? What do you care?

  She screamed wait wait.

  I said Jack’s wife?

  She screamed yeah yeah Jack’s wife.

  I said Jack’s wife from Goethe?

  She screamed yeah Jack’s wife.

  I said listen. Let another person talk sometimes.

  She stopped screaming.

  Are you listening I said.

  She whispered yes yes.

  Gloonk I hung up.

  That night Genghis Khan and The Stomach were together. I didn’t say anything. I went home and put my foot in the toilet bowl and flushed the water. Who needs a hospital? Or a small skinny from Budapest? Not for me.A friend calls and I said hello Jack. I also have a toilet bowl. It sucks my foot and soon it feels better. At night I knock over the garbage bag under the sink so in the dark I listen to them eat. The rats are happy. I’m happy. I yell sleep. It comes like a taxicab.

  Some Laughed

  T. T. MANDELL locked his office door, then read letters from experts advising the press against publishing his book, The Enduring Southey. One letter was insulting, another expressed hatred. All agreed The Enduring Southey—“an examination of the life and writing of Robert Southey”—should not be published. Every letter was exceedingly personal and impeccably anonymous. Mandell, an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication art at Bronx Community State Extension, had hoped to win a permanent position at the college. But no published book, no job. In effect, the experts said T. T. Mandell should be fired. But in every negative lives a positive. Mandell could read the letters; Mandell could revise The Enduring Southey. Where he’d previously said “yes” or “no,” he now said “perhaps yes,” “perhaps no.” Miss Nugent, the department secretary, retyped the manuscript, then mailed it to another press. It was rejected.

  T. T Mandell locked his office door, then read the letters. All different, yet one conclusion: The Enduring Southey must not be published. Again there were insults: “To publish this book would represent an attack on the mind.” Mandell wasn’t troubled by insults. His life had been shaped by them. Two criticisms, however, were troubling:

  The introductory chapter is full of errors of fact and judgment, and the prose is like that of a foreigner who has no feeling for English and probably not much more for his indigenous bush tongue.

  The other:

  The introductory chapter, where Mandell says he approaches Southey from the inside, is bad. The rest of the manuscript falls below its level.

  Mandell realized, considering these criticisms, “Even experts can’t agree.” More important, a contradiction implied intellectual space. He could perhaps shoot The Enduring Southey through that space into publication. He corrected facts wherever he sensed them. With commas he jerked his style toward elegance. Because an expert had said the introductory chapter was best, Mandell put it last. Miss Nugent retyped, then mailed The Enduring Southey to another press. It was rejected.

  T. T. Mandell locked his office door and thought: I went to required schools, received required degrees, made changes required by experts. What then do they want? It struck him: A man can’t be rejected. He can only reject himself. Thus he recovered will and, to the new criticisms, responded with vigorous compliance. He eradicated paragraphs and pages as if they contained nothing. Though he worried about leaving breaks in his argument, time was short. He could not say, when required to state his achievements, that for a long while he had been rewriting a book that he had been rewriting. Anyone could say that. Even a moron. The manuscript — retyped, mailed to a scholarly press called Injured Merit — was returned with a letter from an editor: “Chop Southey in half. Put in pictures.”

  T. T. Mandell locked his office door, removed his clothes; silently, he rolled on the floor.

  To colleagues he showed the letter — not with pride but by the way, as if unsure of its tone. They said it urged, without committing the editor to a promise of publication, that Mandell rewrite and resubmit. He frowned, puckered, and said, “Hmmm.” His colleagues stared. He himself wondered, fleetingly, if he wasn’t a prick.

  Mandell cut The Enduring Southey in half and inserted a photo of the library in the Bronx where he’d done research. Below the photo he wrote, “Thanks.” It occurred to him to insert a photo of himself. That might seem presumptuous, but he remembered scholarly books where the author’s photo appeared — an old book on Southey, for example. In the library he found that book again, but no photo, only a drawing, and not of the author but Southey. Mandell nearly cried. Instead, he laughed and told people. Some laughed.

  The Enduring Southey was not resubmitted to Injured Merit. It had become too good. Miss Nugent mailed it to a university press. It was rejected.

  T. T. Mandell locked his office door, then telephoned a number he had prepared for this eventuality. A moment later he spoke to a lawyer who specialized in outrage. Mandell told the lawyer what degrees he held and where he had been teaching, as an assistant professor, for several years, while he tried to fulfill the publication requirements of a scholar as well as the general institution of requirements as such. He spoke of his faith in the system. He said he wasn’t a troublemaker or a critic of prevailing values but the author of a proper book rewritten according to the criticism of experts. There had been a time, Mandell said, when he wore sneakers to class, but upon noticing that no other faculty members wore sneakers, he quit doing so. There were other things of this nature, but, Mandell believed, the lawyer had the picture. The lawyer then explained: “Professor, there’s no action in this crap.” Mandell read the letters, revised the manuscript, threw out the photo. Miss Nugent retyped, mailed. The Enduring Southey was rejected.

  T. T. Mandell locked his office door. As if from the abyss of authenticity, a voice came: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a nice guy.” Mandell listened. The voice continued: “I made the whale.” Mandell felt depressed — or deepened. In this mood, he made revisions.

  Miss Nugent now wore gla
sses and walked faster. Leaving her typewriter to go pee, she always glanced at her wristwatch as if to confirm her need. She retyped The Enduring Southey, mailed it away again, then again. Mandell’s face had a greasy, dissatisfied quality now, impossible to wash or shave away, and his manner had gained spasmodic vigor. Once he interrupted a conversation between two colleagues, rushing up to their lunch table, driving a bread knife into the Formica top, and shouting, “You were talking about Moby Dick, right?”

  The Enduring Southey had been mailed away for the last time. To Stuttgart. Miss Nugent believed the finest scholarly books were published there. Mandell could afford no more rejections, certainly none that might take long in coming, but Miss Nugent felt The Enduring Southey was hers as much as his. She wanted the last rejection to come from the best. The Enduring Southey was accepted.

  A VW mechanic in Mandell’s neighborhood translated the letter for him. Mandell waved it at Miss Nugent and flung into a dance before her typewriter. She pummeled the keys and hissed, “Don’t let them have it. Tell them to screw off.” He gave her a look of terror and fled.

  Der andauernde Southey was published. Mandell was given permanency. He mastered the ho-ho style of laughter and, at department meetings, said things like “What fun.” Discussing the book with students who, someday, would write one like it, he said it wrote itself. Nasty reviews appeared, but they were in German. Mandell was considered an expert and received manuscripts from university presses with requests for his opinion. His letters were always written with uncompromising and incisive hatred.

  The Captain

  HE SMILED AT HER. She smiled at him and ate dessert, her pinky so nicely hooked it tore my heart. Dessert was pear under chocolate and flaming brandy. It slipped from spoon to blubbery dissolution. When I tried to taste, I swallowed. Then came a flickering city of liqueurs. Then marijuana, a language green and gold popping around the table from mouth to mouth. Nothing went by me unlipped. Nothing tasted. From course to course I’d swallowed textures, not tastes, like a cat gobbling kill. I’d eaten; I wanted to eat. Other guests flashed marvels achieved, readiness to die. Music from the drawing room — black, full of drum — summoned us to further pleasure. Actual blacks, stationed around the table, stiff and smug in tuxedos, gleamed consummation. I assumed they’d pissed in our soup. Stanger smiled at Mildred. She at him. Above glass, silver, flowers, candles, and the ministrations of swift black hands, everyone at the table had smiled for the last two hours. Servants are the price elegance pays to pain. Alone, the Stangers couldn’t have made this occasion for forty guests; not without threatening every institution upon which society stands. To that sentiment, I drank piss. A ritual initiation. I’d never been to such a dinner party, but I could tell it was first-rate. Teeth stabbed out of my ass to eat the chair. However, the meal was over. Stanger rose. His hand claimed my wife’s lower back. They strolled to the drawing room, a sight flattering to me, the lovely valley of her back appreciated in his munificent hand. Yet it gave me a feeling I couldn’t understand, act upon, or use. Like Hamlet’s feeling in Elsinore. But this was no dingy, boozy castle in barbaric Denmark. This was Now Town, Sutton Place. Windows triangulated, above the East River, north to Welfare Island, south to the Statue of Liberty. I couldn’t make a speech or kill. I did what I could. I tried not to look at them, not to see. I joined the other guests, wondering what brought them here. Did they all want jobs? During our interview, Stanger said,“Come to dinner, Mr. Liebowitz. On Bastille Day. We’ll chat some more about the job.” I arrived. He nodded at me, took Mildred’s arm, then talked to her, no one else, and here I was, his dinner in my gut, his grass in my brain, talking to myself, thinking grass. How did you play this game? Like a delegate to my thinking, Mrs. Stanger swept boldly through the grass. “So, Mr. Liebowitz, you’re interested in publishing,” and she led me to a chair opposite hers. “You’ll make a lovely publisher.” Her shoes were gold, her dress was white material through which I couldn’t tell if I couldn’t see. Intimations of symmetry seesawed her voice. Slowly, precisely, she crossed her legs, sliding white skin beneath white, translucent membrane. Her shoe began winding in the air. I looked.

  “You can have the shoe, Mr. Liebowitz. Are you a man who wants things?”

  “Everyone must want your things, Mrs. Stanger.”

  And that’s what I thought. Yet I had to beg Mildred to dress for this party, comb her hair, show me good girl in the aspect of sullen bitch:

  “Do you want to walk so quickly, Phillip? Do you want to suppose Stanger won’t give you the job if we’re two minutes late? Is it thrilling to have people think you’re out with some whore? Is that what you want? Take my arm, you bastard, or I don’t go another step.”

  A savage ride on the IRT, then worse in the crosstown cab.

  “Two bucks for a lousy cab. But if I need, really need, a pair of shoes, you throw a fit. Tomorrow, I buy shoes. Hear me?”

  She hadn’t wanted to go. I had wanted to rush. Stanger had nodded at me, taken her arm, and la-la — I looked — his hand was on her knee. Wanting not to go, she had a moral advantage. She could now blow him and lift a virtuous face: “Don’t give me that jealous crap.”

  Mrs. Stanger, apparently, wanted symmetry. A social lady with a Viking face, symmetrical by instinct. The ghost of long bone figure, unexorcised by a life of such occasions, still fighting, giving good as it got. Perfect for Stanger. Why not for me? One thinks meat or languishes.

  Her eyes were tiger-bronze. They looked at me; not across the room at them. She seemed to be saying, “Do you really want the job, Mr. Liebowitz?” And she was. Winding her shoe, stirring a golden pool of time. I had five seconds, perhaps, to seem not stupid. The mathematics of her face demanded speed and precision, answers in kind, not self-analysis. I clicked on the smarts:

  Stanger wanted Mildred. His missus wanted me. I wanted the job. The question was, then: What could I get? The answer answered everything. If I couldn’t get only what I wanted, I had to want what I could get, to get what I wanted. Things equal to the same equal one another.

  “Do you really want the job, Mr. Liebowitz?”

  I said, “Let’s fuck.”

  She blinked and shook her head. She sighed.

  I had been too quick, too smart. I shrugged like a man with nothing more to say, and looked across the room at them, sitting close together on a couch, talking. To express life’s failure, I lifted a cigarette. Mrs. Stanger knocked it out of my mouth. “That’s a social disease, Mr. Liebowitz.” She stood up in a blur of dancing and a storm of jazz, turned, pushed through shuddering couples, and went around a corner, disappeared. Reappeared. Frowning at me. To my feet I leaped.

  Down a hall in pursuit of her gliding back, feeling concentrated in crotch, monolithic shark with blood in its nose and no appetite for analysis. I’d read that eating is the final extension of touch and believed it. I also believed the reverse. Paintings, etchings, Chinese jugs, chairs, tables, sculptured metals whispered as they flashed by, “Beast, beast, beast.” Right. Psychology and art were dead. I didn’t understand my motives, but that didn’t prove I had any. Does the moon have a motive? Aristotle says, “Love.” All right, love. Later, with nothing at stake, I’d return to this hall and contemplate a jug, make excuses for love, recall the meal, the hideous smiling, how he didn’t talk to me, how Mildred did. I’d argue, Between me and Mildred had loomed the shape of a foreign penis. His moon. My motive. I’d recall the job, my own penis, and I’d raise the distinction between men and women. Men do what they have to do. A woman can do anything a man can do, but does she have to? Mrs. Stanger didn’t have to open the door. I stepped through it into another world. The enemy of Freud, the son of Marx, Phillip Liebowitz. Plunging beyond analysis in the wake of a shark.

  The walls bore guns, horsewhips, heads of gazelle, buffalo, giraffe, and photos of Stanger amid naked blacks and guns. Dead animals lay at his feet. Mrs. Stanger locked the door and turned with her shoes kicked off, standing shorter, flat-footed, loose in
arm and shoulder, chin up to give me a level glance from slits. Her expression, face and body, said, “Go on, look, Mr. Liebowitz. I’m without my shoes and no less terrific.” There was a dull lamp in a corner of the room. Its light mixed delicate oils for metal and a breath of leather. She advanced in it slowly, face darkening, slits shining. “Don’t you dare fuck me.” We used the back of a brown bear. Her face beneath mine, in a field of bristle, opened as she opened and opened. Her hands slid up my spine, then away, up through her hair. Rings clicked on bear teeth. She fingered the fangs until they were bloody, then lay still, silent, perfectly flat, showing the indifference to my glance and the perfect ease of a woman who is proud of her body. I dressed. When I stood over her, she said, “Poor me. See the boo-boo. Lick the boo-boo, Mr. Liebowitz.” I kneeled. She fed me fingers. I licked. The mute choir of staring animals, fifty Mr. Stangers, naked blacks, instruments of pain and annihilation, dull light intimating the circles of her breasts and white shield of belly, thickening of hair and shadow at the conflation of thighs and greater labia, were in my mouth. I swallowed.

  The party had mounted to its preclimactic moment, music booming, blacks winding about wheeling carts of ice, glasses, and bottles. I felt the general tension that precedes both success and failure. All could decline into scattered, desultory chitchat or fly toward community. Two men, stripped to the waist, were fighting in a corner. Some guests made a circle about them. Most were dancing, or talking in groups. I returned to the chair I had been sitting in. Black hands fixed me a bourbon; yellow; kickling ice. Through it I watched Stanger and Mildred, the intense, wishy-washy figures of an erotic urn, evoking the prick of perpetuity. Blows, grunts, incoherent curses, spiced with squeals from spectators, filled gaps in the music. The ambience was dense, rude, various flow. Blacks in tuxedos; hard black rock; whites chatting, slugging, dancing the inventions of black kids in ghettos. To think was impossible. I couldn’t have added two and two unless driven by hatred or an equivalent passion. I couldn’t have read a paragraph of Austen or James unless I shrieked each word. Mrs. Stanger remained behind to wash. I had nothing to do but sit, feel the life, watch Stanger and Mildred, drink my bourbon. Then a big wild lady plopped into Mrs. Stanger’s chair. Her dress was channeled to discover tits, her talk was electrified by topics of slick magazines — decadent New York, divorce, the problems so many had these days with kids. She mentioned grass raps, politics, syphilis, runaways, and said, “I used to play kissing games, but today a kid spots a hair on his crotch and runs out to fuck.” She waited for my comment. I grinned agreement. Between her tits the stream of little hair was bleached. Her own kid, she said, making a bomb, had blown out his eye. “Blew it out,” she sneered, as if amazed at his incompetence. My head shook sympathetically while inside — along with the tiger haunted by former ass and thigh — I added first-class eats, marijuana, servants, and the job, say twenty thousand. “Blew it out,” she repeated, encouraging me to respond. I tried for a sexual-philosophical tone. “There is nothing left not to do, is there?” She looked puzzled and annoyed, as if, despite blatant tits and endless mouth, she hated double messages. “I mean, you know, make bombs. Fuck. What have you.” The men fighting had begun to shout. One claimed the other had kicked him in the balls, which was against the rules. Then the blows were thicker and louder. Tits laughed, slapped her hand lightly on my face, and gave it a little push, the way one treats a naughty child. Affectionate repudiation. “You’re a gas,” she said, her hand lingering on my lips, but sensing a prior claim, she withdrew it. Mrs. Stanger had appeared and stood looking down at us. I tried to keep the tits sitting by turning my back slightly to Mrs. Stanger. But the tits, unnerved, rose from the chair and turned her ass to me, as though displaying another pair of tits in departure. Mrs. Stanger reassumed her chair. I leaned toward her in humble admiration and squeezed her thigh. “I wanna marijuana, Mrs. Stanger.”