The Collected Stories

by Leonard Michaels

  I meet Eddie for lunch. He wants to talk, but is too agitated, doesn’t know how to begin. We order this and that. He starts, tells me that his wife came to his office and made a scene. There were patients in the waiting room. He had to beg her to shut up till they got out in the street. It wasn’t better in the street. She berated him, threatened to ruin his life. His eyes begin to glisten and now I can’t eat. I imagine her yelling at him in front of his patients. I hear myself groan with sympathy. Then he says, “I bought a radio car. It’s about this big.” He raises his hands, holding them a foot and a half apart. “It’s fast, too.”

  I was talking to Eddie about difficulties with my wife’s lawyer. He cuts me off, very excited, nearly manic, shouting about difficulties with his wife’s lawyer. “She snarls at me in legal letters, like I might forget this is war. I get very upset. I write back long angry letters. I tear them up, then write angrier letters and tear them up, too. Today I decided I can’t write. I must phone and tell her what I think of her fucking letters. So I phoned. Soon as I say my name, her voice becomes high and warm. Like she is delighted to hear from me. I thought maybe I dialed the wrong number, reached her cunt. But you know what? I responded very warmly. Like a prick.”

  Women are tough. They know what they want. Men know more or less what they need, which is only what they like, not even what they need. King Lear wails, “But, for true need …” then can’t define it. That’s a real man.

  My neighbor is building his patio, laying bricks meticulously. The sun beats on him. Heat rises off the bricks into his face. I’m in here writing. He’ll have built a patio. I’ll be punished.

  X tells Y. Y repeats it to W and thus betrays X. The moment of telling, for X, felt like prayer, almost sanctified. He thinks the betrayal was evil, but evil lay in the telling, in daring to assume one could.

  Spoke to her on the phone. She cried. Said she missed me. I feel like a ghoul wandering in the darkness.

  The secretary said a long goodbye. A minuscule flake of mucus, like a fish scale, trembled in her right nostril. Her face shone with cosmetic oils, as in feverish sweating. I thought she loved me, and I was reluctant to meet her eyes. I could have kissed her, perhaps changed her life, made her a great pianist, or poet, or tennis star, kissing her every day.

  Eddie says he wanted to run out into the street, grab the first person he saw, and tell that person everything. He wanted to tell everything to anybody. But he picked up the phone and dialed his girlfriend. When she said hello, the sweetness of her voice, which had always pleased him, enraged him. He spoke with strenuously deliberate slowness, as if to a very stupid person, as he told her about the burning sensation he felt that morning when he pissed. She made no comment, asked no question. She understood what he was getting at. With the same slowness, he continued to speak to her, now offering an analysis of her character, saying things she would never forget, frightening even to him when he thought later about what he’d said. She said, when he let her speak, “You didn’t get it from me.” He heard the pressure of feeling in her voice, and he knew that she wanted to say much more, but she could only manage to repeat, “You didn’t get it from me.” Then she hung up. Eddie phoned her again immediately, still angry but already regretful, and no less wretched, probably, than she. She wouldn’t pick up the receiver. This struck him as unjust, but what could he do? He went into the next room. His wife, sitting at her desk, was writing a letter. She looked so much involved in her letter that Eddie was reluctant to say anything to her, but he couldn’t be silent. The very sound of his voice, as he began, struck him as criminal, a violation of their peaceful domestic order. He was deeply ashamed as he said, “I have an infection.” He was about to tell her about his girlfriend, but she thrust herself away from her desk, rushed toward him, sank to her knees, and clutched his legs. “I betrayed you,” she said. “I betrayed you in every possible way.” Eddie says it wasn’t simply her confession that appalled him. It was the strangeness of her emotion and the way she begged, “Forgive me, forgive me.” The words came from far away, like sounds in the night, as though he and she had nothing in common, only the darkness, and there couldn’t even be anything to forgive.

  His neck was as thick as his head, and he had long heavy arms. His hands were stained black in the creases and in the cusp of his fingernails. Beside him stood a pale girl about nine years old. Too clean and pretty to be his daughter, but they had the same flat, grim expression and whenever he moved she moved. She was his daughter. They didn’t talk to each other, didn’t look at each other. He finished his business at the counter and turned to go. She turned to go. She walked step by step beside him out the door and into the parking lot. They looked sad. A brutalized man; a pale girl. As I watched them through the glass windows of the door, the man whirled suddenly, sweeping up the girl in his tremendous arms. She screamed. My heart bulged, as though I had to act quickly to save her, but her scream changed from terror to delight. My heart dissolved. That man would die for her. She hugged his monstrous neck. Would she find such love again?

  Eddie invited his soon-to-be-former wife and her lover, a guy with two kids, over to his place for dinner. He cooked a duck, prepared a garden salad, and built a fire. They sat watching it after dinner, sipping cognac. His wife and her lover stayed the night. Eddie’s house is big, lots of extra rooms. He says they talked for hours, but something was wrong. He keeps thinking about it. “I don’t know,” he says, “something was wrong.” I laugh. He laughs, too, but I can tell he doesn’t know what’s funny.

  I talk to Annette only on the phone. Afraid we might touch.

  Henry is talking and eating a turkey sandwich. A piece of turkey falls out of his sandwich onto the floor. My life stops. What will he do? Something told me that he will go on talking as he picks it up and pops it into his mouth. He did exactly that. I felt we knew each other. At his funeral, I thought, I will cry.

  I asked Boris to read my screenplay. Then I sat in his living room. He stood and spoke in complete sentences, built paragraphs, obliged me to read him. He wanted revenge for having done me a favor. I responded to him with laughter, dismay, surprise, assent, always appropriate and quick, feeling insulted by his concern for my edification. Other friends read it and said it isn’t good; others said it is. One said, “The best screenplay in the world can be made into a lousy movie.” Was the reverse also true? There was no truth.

  Only desire and luck prevail in this world. If my screenplay isn’t good, could it be bad enough to succeed?

  Boris tells me he really loves Y and he REALLY wants to fuck X. Montaigne says there is more wildness in thinking than in lust.

  Whatever was wrong was wrong from the instant we met, but like kids with big eyes we plunged into eating. Later she said, “I knew it instinctively. I could feel it was wrong.” Even then she reached me, her voice speaking — beyond the words — of her. I must have the heart of a dog. I live beneath meaning.

  I eat standing up, leaning over the sink. I wouldn’t eat like this if anyone could see me.

  Her voice is flat and coolly distant, so I imagine things aren’t over between us.

  From the woe that is in marriage has come the Iliad and ten thousand novels, but nothing from me. I missed her voice too much. After talking to her on the telephone, I turn on the radio loud.

  The distance between us is neither long nor short, merely imperishable, like the sentiment in an old song.

  A huge fellow with the face of a powerful dullard stood behind the counter. He turned for items on the shelf and I saw that his pants had slipped below his hips, where he was chopped sheer from lower back to legs. No ass to hold up his pants. His bulk pushed forward and heaved up into his chest. He had a hanging mouth and little eyes with a birdlike shine. I bought salami and oranges from him, though I no longer felt any desire to eat.

  Eddie said he ran into his former wife in the street in New York, and they talked. They talked as if neither of them knew how to say nice to see you, I’m expected somewher
e, goodbye, goodbye. They went to a restaurant and ate and talked some more, and they went to her apartment, and they made love. Then she said, “So why did we get divorced?” Eddie smiled at me and said, “See?” as if he were the idiot of circumstances, shlepped into pain and confusion by his cock. “You know how long I was divorced before I remarried?” he asked. “Not three days,” he said. I was sad for him and for her, and her, and her. The feeling widened like circles about a leaf fallen onto the surface of a pond.

  We left Berkeley on December 14, driving south on Route 5, straight, flat road policed by aircraft. Jesse, eleven years old, twisted the radio dial searching for rock music. Ethan, fourteen, in the backseat with the luggage, was reading. For no reason, they’d begin to fight. Holding the wheel with one hand, I smacked at them with the other until they stopped. They were bored. There was nothing to see but the canal, a vein that leaked life out of Northern California into the agricultural empire of the Central Valley and beyond that into real estate from Los Angeles to Mexico.

  At twilight we checked into a motel near Barstow. The boys chased each other about the room and began wrestling. I stepped outside and waited until they’d wrestled themselves into a stupor.

  Early the next morning I woke them and said, “Shower and pack. We’re going to the Grand Canyon. It’s ten miles deep and full of snakes and panthers.” They cheered. I left for the motel office. The sunlight was brassy, the air was cool. Big trucks running down the highway pulled at me. Get out in the energy. Go.

  Behind the motel desk stood a woman about fifty, with a red loaf of hair, like body and blood mashed into her personal fashion statement. While figuring my bill she said, “Going home for the holidays?”

  “I’m delivering my sons to their mother. We’re divorced, passing them back and forth. I’m doing it for the first time.” She looked up, startled. I was startled, too. I’d been babbling, as if I’d owed her a confession in exchange for what she offered in her hair. It got to me, bespeaking desire beyond consummation on this planet, bulging upward, packed and patted into shape, bursting with laborious and masturbatory satisfaction, like a bourgeois novel, the kind you live with for days or weeks, reading slowly, nourished by its erotic intimacies and the delicious anxieties of a plot, wishing it would never never end.

  “I once drove my Labrador from Berkeley to Sacramento,” I said, “and gave it to a family that could take better care of it than I could. Then I had to sit by the side of the road for half an hour, until I could stop crying and drive.”

  “You’re talking about a dog?”

  “Yes. A Labrador retriever. Now I’m going to New York.”

  “You’re going a funny way to New York.”

  “We’ll stop at the Grand Canyon and have some fun. I’m taking a southern route to avoid bad weather.”

  She stood very still, as my meaning sifted down and settled inside her like sediment in a wine bottle. I said again, “Bad weather.” Her head dipped, the red dome a second head, making a slow double bludgeon of assent. “But it’s better than none at all,” she said.

  “That’s a fact.”

  “It is,” she said. We smiled together. She was a nice lady. She had nice hair. I yearned to be within its fold. I yearned to be taken into her hair.

  I returned to the room. The boys hadn’t showered. Their clothes were flung about everywhere. They sprawled on the beds, gleaming with violence that had ceased when they heard the key in the lock. Like my opponents in a rough game, evil half smiles on their faces, they waited for my move. I thought of strangling them, but nothing in me wanted to move. It was plain they didn’t give a shit about the Grand Canyon.

  At a place called Truck Stop, I ate lunch. Truckers leaned toward each other, eating pills, coffee, and starch. They looked fat, vibrant, seething with bad health.

  Checked into a motel in Manhattan, Kansas, and got the last room. Though it was midnight, people were still arriving. The highway was loud throughout the night. American refugees seek the road, the road.

  Infinitely clear sky and prairie of Kansas. I felt vulnerable, easily seen, as in the eye of God.

  A farmer came into the diner. He wore a baseball cap with a long bill. He was very tanned and dusty and moved ponderously with the pain of this long day. His hands were much bigger than the coffee cup in front of him. He stared at it. In his eyes, no ideas, just questions. “What’s this?” he asked. “A coffee cup,” he told himself. “What do you do with it?” he asked. He told himself, “Pick it up.” Between the first and second question, no words. No words even in the questions.

  A young couple sat opposite of me. The woman was long and pale. Her husband was not as tall as she. His double-breasted suit and dark shiny tie were very ugly. He’d tried to dress impressively, perhaps for an official occasion. She wore a hand-knit gray sweater, setting off her lovely pale complexion. She could have improved her husband’s taste, but was maybe indifferent to it. He had thin, colorless hair and red-rimmed, obedient eyes. They flicked nervously in her direction, hoping for a command. He suggested a small-town bureaucrat whose every action is correct and never spontaneous, but he was in love with his wife and lived in agonizing confusion. He looked to her for sympathy. She offered none. She had what she wanted in life. It was this man, or such a man. She made him feel ashamed of himself, his need of her, specifically her.

  New York. Mother’s apartment. Moritz visits, tells a story. One freezing morning everybody had to go outside and watch a man be hanged. He’d tried to escape the previous night. Beside Moritz stood a boy, the man’s brother. “His nose became red. It was so red,” said Moritz. “That’s what I remember.” Moritz’s eyes enlarge and his voice becomes urgent, as if it were happening again. His excitement isn’t that of a storyteller. He can recite passages from Manfred in Polish, but he isn’t literary. The experience is still too real to him. His memories are very dangerous. He fears another heart attack, but he tells about the camps. It should be remembered as he tells it. Freezing morning. The boy’s red nose.

  Alone, you hear yourself chewing and swallowing. You sound like an animal. With company everyone eats, talk obscures the noises in your head, and nobody looks at what your mouth is doing, or listens to it. In this high blindness and deafness lives freedom. Would I think so if I hadn’t left her?

  She screamed and broke objects. Nevertheless, I refused to kill her.

  Jimmy phones me after midnight. He’s been living in Paris. I haven’t spoken to him for over a year, but I recognize his voice, and I recognize the bar, too, the only one in Berkeley Jimmy likes. I hear the din of a Friday-night crowd and a TV I imagine Jimmy standing in the phone booth, the folding door left open to let me know he doesn’t want to make conversation. He says he needs five hundred and seventy dollars for his rent, which is due tomorrow. He wasted a month trying to find an apartment in Berkeley, and he’ll lose it if he doesn’t come up with five hundred and seventy dollars. He’ll pay me back in a couple of days. I know he won’t. He never pays me back. He says,“I would go to your place, but I’m hitting on some bitch. I just met her. I can’t split.” What about tomorrow morning? Impossible. “I don’t know where I’ll be,” he says.

  I get out of bed and put on my clothes. My hands tremble a little when I tie my shoelaces; I have to concentrate on the job like a kid who just learned how to do it. Then I drive across town to Brennan’s, being careful to stop at stop signs. At night cops get lonely and need to have a word with you.

  Brennan’s is crowded and loud. I can’t spot Jimmy, though he’s the only black man in the room — if he’s there. He is. He’s waving to me from the bar. I must have been looking at him for a few seconds before I saw him, because he is laughing at me.

  The woman on the stool beside him is wearing jeans and high heels. She’s blond, like all his others. When I walk up, Jimmy turns his back to her, takes my hand. He doesn’t introduce us. She looks away and begins watching the talk show on TV I slip Jimmy the check I’ve written. He doesn’t look at it
as he folds it into his wallet and says, “Thanks, man. I’ll pay you back. Have a drink.” I tell him I’m not feeling good. I can’t stay. But he has ordered an Irish whiskey for me. It’s waiting on the bar beside his own.

  He tells the guy next to him there’s a free stool at the end of the bar. Would he mind? The guy picks up his beer and leaves. I take his stool and Jimmy hugs me, laughing at this accomplishment. The blonde, on his other side, glances at me and then back to the TV as if she doesn’t expect to be introduced and is indifferent, anyway. I wonder if the Irish whiskey will be good for my flu. My hand trembles when I pick it up. I ask Jimmy how it was in Paris. He says,“Oh, man, you know. I get tired of them, even the finest ones.” The blonde, I suppose, is also fine. What lasts is him and me. This idea is at the margins of my mind, fever occupies the middle like a valley of fog. I know for sure Jimmy has flattering ways. He says, “Look, man, do you really want to do this?” He’s studying my glazed eyes. I think he’s concerned about my illness, and then realize he means the money. “Didn’t I?” I say, reaching into my shirt pocket before I remember that I gave him the check. Now I’m embarrassed. “Talk about something else, will you?” I say, though he wants me to ease the burden of gratitude. I get out of bed with fever to give him money … I don’t finish the thought. The blonde turns, looks at me with cold blue intelligent eyes, but I see better than she does. I see that the connection to Jimmy is her fate. He’s going to hurt her. She holds her martini as if she is invincible, and smokes her cigarette in a world-weary manner. I say, “I’m sick, man. Would I be here if I didn’t want to be?” The blonde half-laughs, more a cough than a laughing sound. She wants me to leave and shows it by putting down her martini and heading for the ladies’ room. Jimmy turns and watches. Her jeans are cut for trouble. The door shuts behind her and Jimmy says, “Her name is Gunnel. She’s bad.”