The Collected Stories

by Leonard Michaels

  He laughs, unable to contain his excitement. Then he slaps my arm, surprised by how entertaining I am, though I’ve been very dull. I laugh, too, but I won’t ever give him another cent, I think. That’s what I always think. Then one night the phone rings and he says, “Hey, man,” his voice low and personal, like there’s nobody in the world but him and me.

  Boris drove past me in his new car, speeding down Euclid Avenue, picking his nose. He didn’t see me. He was watching the road, driving fast, obsessed with his nose. Each life, says Ortega, is a perspective on reality.

  Boris laughs at his unexpressed jokes, then gives me a compassionate look for having missed the point known only to himself.

  I found a modest place with only three main dishes on the menu, none over ten bucks. Not good; not terrible. In Oakland near the courthouse. Nobody I know is likely to walk in. I don’t remember the name of the place, I never noticed. I was eating dinner and reading the legal papers, telling myself they’re written in English, they will have a great effect on my life, so I should try to understand them, I must be calm and read slowly, when the door opens and lets in a draft with street noise and perfume. The noise hits me like a personal criticism, the perfume cuts through the steam coming off my plate. I look toward the door. I see a white linen blouse, pearls, and a face heavily made up, correct for the pearls but not for dinner in this place. Maybe the pearls are to suggest that she’s meeting somebody here, but something tells me she is alone. Her green eye shadow is a touch sloppy, as if she wants to be beautiful, but she has troubles, agonies, who knows. Maybe she’s a lawyer, works too hard, and wishes she’d had a child instead of a career. The green eye shadow, part of a mask, tells more than it hides. I look away to avoid her feelings. I don’t know her. I’m eating dinner. I’ll soon finish, smoke a cigarette, and then go home to sleep without a body against whose heat to press my complications. The food tastes like pork or chicken, but not enough like either to create anxieties. I don’t remember what I ordered, but it’s boring. I like it.

  I’m trying to eat and read, not to look at her, though she is garishly depressed and sits five feet away. The waiter goes to her. It’s his job. She tells him she wants the fish, but without sauce, and she would like it grilled, not poached. I look. He starts to ask what else she wants. She interrupts, asks if the wine is dry. He says, “Yes.” She says, “Very dry?” He says,“I’ll ask,” and hustles away to the kitchen. I hear him consult the chef in a foreign language, maybe Arabic. She calls from the table,“I don’t want it if it isn’t very dry.” He comes back, whispers, “It’s very dry.” She then says that she’ll have soup and salad, but no cream in the soup, and bring the salad dressing on the side, then adds “Please” with a too strong voice and a frightened stare, like a person who is basically shy, struggling to be forthright. Instead of forthright, a kind of begging enters her tone, almost sexual. She smiles, amused at having betrayed herself, and also as if the waiter must be grateful for such a gift, which has now established a bond between them. He smiles politely and hurries away, confused by messages. She sits alone. As the waiter goes about his business at other tables, a light inside her grows dim. She feels abandoned. I want to rise and go hug her, or at least mess up her clothes, but you can’t do anything for anybody. “Oh, waiter,” she cries, “could you please bring the bread now?” He starts for the bread. “And I’d like a little water.” He hurries to her with bread and water, as if that’s what she wants.

  Every wildness plays with death. Washing your hands is a ritual to protect against death, and so are all the small correct things you do every day. Aren’t there people who do nothing else? They pay their bills on time and go to the doctor once a year. They have proper sentiments and beliefs. They are nice people. I wanted to do dull ordinary chores all day. I wanted to be like nice people only to forget death, only to feel how I’m still alive.

  The waiter does everything quick, everything right — no sauce on the fish, dry wine, salad dressing on the side. Then he bends over her and whispers, “Why are you angry?”

  She says, “I’m not angry.”

  He says, “I can see that you’re angry.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “Didn’t I bring you everything you asked for?” His voice becomes bigger, self-pitying. “Fish, soup, bread, wine. Everything you asked for.”

  She says, “I shouldn’t have to ask.”

  The waiter walks away rolling his eyes. He doesn’t understand American women. I rise, go to her table, and say, “Do you mind if I join you?”

  She says, “What took you so long?”

  She pressed my leg with hers under the table. Conversation stopped. She continued pressing, then pulled away abruptly. Conversation resumed. She did it to excite herself, that’s all. Her makeup was sloppy, her clothes were stylish. She’d start to say something, then laugh and say, “No.” I’d never seen anyone more depressed. She said, “Driving to work I brush my teeth. I’m the invisible woman.”

  I said, “I locked myself out of my office and my car. I don’t even exist.”

  She said, “I lost my checkbook and sunglasses. Nobody needs them.”

  “I forgot my appointment. Nobody wants to meet me.”

  She frowned. “You’re trying and that’s sweet. But I don’t care.”

  Billy says, “Why don’t you let me do it? Afraid you might like it?”

  Billy phones, says, “Want to play?” I think about it, then say, “The traffic is heavy. It will take forever to get to your place. I can’t stay long. I’d feel I’m using you. It’s not right. I don’t want to use you.” She says, “But I want to be used.” I drive to Billy’s place. She opens the door naked, on her knees. We fuck. “Do you think I’m sick?” she says. I say, “No.” “Good,” she says, “I don’t think you’re sick either.”

  You know your feelings, so you mistrust them, as if they belonged to an unreliable stranger. He behaved badly in the past and is likely to do so again. But you can’t believe that. You believe you’ve changed. Then it happens again and the same feelings surprise you. Now you’re fearful of yourself because of what you can’t not do.

  If there are things I’d never tell a psychotherapist, I would waste time and money talking to one. It would feel like a lie. I need a priest.

  Sex in one place. Feeling in another.

  Afterward, afterward, it is more desolating than when a good movie ends or you finish a marvelous book. We should say “going,” not “coming.” Anyhow, the man should say, “Oh God, I’m going, I’m going.”

  Schiller says, “When the soul speaks, then — alas — it is no longer the soul that speaks.” William Blake says, “Never seek to tell thy love/Love that never told can be.” They mean the same as Miles Davis’s version of “My Funny Valentine,” so slowly played, excruciating, broken, tortured.

  She wore baggy pants, a man’s sweater, no makeup, and had strong opinions about everything, as if to show, despite her exceedingly beautiful face and body, she damn well had a mind. I felt sick with regret at having met her, ready to forgive every fault, half in love with a woman I won’t ever see again.

  The soul is known through intuitions, or forms without meaning — like fish, flowers, music … Certainly not a face.

  “Do you think it’s possible to have fifteen sincere relationships?”

  “Not even one,” says Billy. “Let me tie you to the bed.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want you to.”

  “I’ll stop when you tell me. Just don’t say ‘stop.’ That only excites me. Say ‘tomato’ or something.”

  Deborah wants to have her eyes fixed so they’ll look like white eyes and she hates her landlady who gave her the Etna Street apartment, choosing her over 157 other applicants. Her landlady assumed Deborah is a good girl, clean and quiet. “A Japanese angel,” says Deborah with a sneer. I was shocked by her racism. I hadn’t imagined that she thought of herself as Japanese. She showed me
photos of her family. Mother, father, brothers, sister — all Japanese, but I hadn’t supposed she thought she was, too. What the hell did I imagine? Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxury that makes you deeply stupid.

  Deborah holds a new blouse up to her chin, tilts her head, and says, “Do you like this blouse?” I look at it and at her, how she’s tilted her head so seriously, waiting for my opinion, but I can’t speak. She sees what’s happening and lowers the blouse. Her head remains tilted like an iris on the fine white stalk of her neck. She whispers, as if there were someone else in the room, “You’re hopeless. You’re like my girlfriend. I ask if she likes what I’m wearing and she says, ‘You’re beautiful.’”

  Margaret says she went to Cesar’s Latin Palace and stood at the bar until some guy asked her to dance, a handsome Jamaican. Great dancer. She says there’s a divorced couple at Cesar’s who will not have anything to do with each other, except when they show up Saturday night and dance together, drawn to the music in each other’s body. When the number ends they separate instantly, without a word, and go to different tables. They’d rather drink with strangers. Then the great Francisco Aquabella starts slapping conga drums, driving the whole world to cha-cha-cha, and she feels the need for him, that one, the guy over there across the floor sitting with the white bitch, that one who is standing up and crossing the floor to her table, and she is standing up, too, even before he asks her to dance, feeling the music in his body. Don’t talk to me about love. Talk about cha-cha-cha, and the way he touches her. His eyes are cold, yet full of approval. When they dance, they belong to each other and nothing else matters until the music ends.

  Kittredge loves pretty women, but he is blind, can’t pursue them. So I take him to a party and describe a woman in the room. He whispers, “Tell me about her neck.” Eventually I introduce him to her. They leave the party together. Kittredge is always successful. Women think he listens differently from other men. In his blind hands they think pleasure is truth. Blind hands know deep particulars, what yearns in neck and knee. Women imagine themselves embracing Kittredge the way sunlight takes a tree. He says, “Talk about her hips.”As I talk, his eyes slide with meanings, like eyes in a normal face except quicker, a snapping in them. Kittredge cannot see, cannot know if a woman is pretty. I say, “She has thick black hair.” When they leave together I begin to sink. I envy the magnetic darkness of my friend. To envy him without desiring his condition is possible.

  Evelyn told me that Sally, her dearest friend—“Don’t ever repeat this!”—came down with the worst case of herpes the doctor had ever seen.

  Evelyn’s four-year-old son had a nightmare in which Evelyn appeared with a big knife stuck in her head. She has scheduled him for psychotherapy five days a week.

  Margaret says she went back to Cesar’s. The Jamaican asked her to dance again. She refused. She liked him, but she kept a closed face. If she showed interest, he’d think she was in the same mood as last time. They would dance, then go out to his car and make love. She said, “I have a Ph.D. I can do anything. I can even read fashion magazines. He’s a nice guy, but he’d never understand me.”

  Deborah’s dentist, a little Jewish man, talks incessantly and she can’t say a word because her mouth is pried open, under investigation by steel instruments, and also hooked like a fish by a suction tube. Nevertheless, her dentist says things that require an answer, so she grunts and moans to say yes, no, really, how nice, too bad. Last time she saw him he carried on about Buddhism, which he studies with monks in a temple. He said, incidentally, that he’d learned to levitate. When he finished working, Deborah could talk. She asked if he meant “meditate” rather than “levitate.” He said, “No. I meant levitate.” She asked him to show her. He said, “No, no.” She pleaded with him. He refused. She refused to leave. He said, “Just once.” He turned his back to her, crouched slightly, and lifted off the floor. I waited for Deborah to continue, but that was the end. She had no more to say. I snapped at her, “He did not levitate.” She said, truly astonished, “He didn’t?”

  Evelyn goes shopping Monday through Sunday. Clothes, jewelry, books, records, prints, paintings, ceramics. Her house of many things shrieks good taste. The latest dress style isn’t always right for Evelyn, but she is the first in town to wear it. She believes her clothing and her automobile say something about her. After shopping, Evelyn feels she’s done good. She must know she is too wide for a zebra-striped dress, but still, it’s the most new thing, and it gives her moral sensations to wear it with bright red socks, her black pearl necklace, and a wide aluminum belt. All of it is hidden under her black cape, which she throws off in the restaurant, driving the women in the place mad with envy.

  Margaret doesn’t like oral sex because she was once forced to do it at gunpoint, in a car, in the parking lot next to the railroad tracks, outside the bar where the guy picked her up. I wish she hadn’t told me. I hear freight trains. I see people coming out of the bar, laughing, drunk, going to their cars while she crouches in misery and fear, the gun at her head. How easy, if I had the gun at his head, to pull the trigger.

  Eddie calls her Stop-and-Go. She’s up early and moving, then collapses into hours of marijuana. It’s like everything with her, he says. No degrees. Truth or lies, good or bad, stop or go. She criticizes Eddie constantly. He can’t do anything right. He wants to break up, but plans to provoke her into doing it by hanging a picture she doesn’t like in a place she finds disturbing. They’ve already argued about that. He took the picture down, but he plans now to put it up again. She’ll see that he is saying the house is his. She’ll go. He says she becomes affectionate after a fight. He finds her adorable then. He says she dislikes his father for his Jewish traits, and also dislikes Eddie for his. He says she doesn’t even know what they are, then smiles in a silly way, as if he weren’t really offended. Tomorrow her mood will be different. She’ll forget what she said today. Her feelings aren’t moored to anything, no important work, like his medical practice, for example. He is accomplished; successful. The woman is merely herself, except when she objects to him. He thinks it costs him nothing and it makes her feel real. He says, “Let me ask you something. You and me, we’ve had dinner together a couple of hundred times. Is there anything about how I eat that looks to you Jewish?”

  “Is that what she thinks?”

  “How I eat, how I dress, how I talk, how I fuck.”

  I laugh.

  “O.K. She doesn’t treat me well,” he says. “She disapproves of me. Criticism is my daily bread. But I’m never lonely with her, never bored. I’m miserable. But this word ‘miserable,’ in my case, is not the end of the discussion. It’s only the beginning. There are kinds of misery …”

  Feelings swarm in Eddie’s face, innumerable nameless nuances, like lights on the ocean beneath a sky of racing clouds. Eddie could have been a novelist or a poet. He has emotional abundance, fluency of self. He’s shameless.

  “Believe me, I’m not a faithful type. I’ve slept with a hundred women. More. But it’s no use. She hits me, curses me. She says, ‘I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be turned on.’ No matter. It begins to happen. She relaxes, lets me disgrace myself. She tells me,‘Lick the insides of my legs while I make this phone call.’ My father slaved six days a week, year after year, to put me through medical school. For me to do this, to lick this woman, he went to an early grave.”

  The paper was thick and creamy, textured like baby flesh. Every night she opened to a new page, wrote the date, then “Dear Diary,” then thought for a minute, then quit. After a while it came to her that she had no internal life. Ortega says this is true of monkeys. But monkeys are known to dream. Evelyn says, “I never had a dream.”

  She was once making love and the bed collapsed on her cat, who was asleep underneath, and broke its back. Since then, she says, sex hasn’t been the same for her. Then she dashes to the sink, grabs a knife, and looks back at me, her teeth shining, chilly as the steel, welcoming me to the
wilderness.