The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

“What about you?” the girl said to Mitchell. “How would you react if I showed up in this dress?”

  “I’d run amok,” Mitchell said, lying immobile on the couch, his eyes closed. “I’d go totally out of control.”

  “See, I might as well, though,” the girl said, examining the mirror again. “Jeff wouldn’t care. Actually, his parents are fairly nauseating people anyway. In fact, his sister just cracked up. She tried to stab her husband with her nail scissors, and they had her put away. Anyhow, if I don’t use it for dinner I can always wear it someplace else.”

  “Oh, shit, though,” Cinder said. “I just remembered. That’s the one with the crooked seam.”

  “Where?” the girl said. “I don’t see it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want anybody wearing it around. Listen, come back next week. I’ll be making up some more, and I’ve got this incredible bronzy-brown that would be really good on you.”

  “Well, I really like this blue, though,” the girl said.

  “Yeah, but I’m out of that, unfortunately,” Cinder said.

  “What a sweet kid,” Cinder said after the girl left. “And wasn’t she pretty? I really hope she doesn’t get hurt.”

  “Sweet!” Mitchell said, and snorted. “No!” he shrieked, twisting, as Cinder leapt onto the couch to tickle him. “Much too stoned!”

  “You are such a cynic!” Cinder said. “Isn’t he, Charlie?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Cinder—how did you know that girl would look good in that dress?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” she said, releasing Mitchell to devote her full attention to this question. “See, I always know. I’m always right about how people look, and how they’re going to look in different things. That is, if they’re worth looking at in the first place. And the horrible truth is, I can do that because I’m such a jealous person!”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “No, it’s true,” she said. “Really. My jealousy is a tool for looking at other people, and now John Paul is my special, sort of, lens. I look at other women through his eyes, and I know what it is in them that he would find attractive. It’s awful. I’m completely subjugated to his vision.”

  “But, Cinder,” I said. “It’s a wonderful talent!”

  “It’s not a talent, Charlotte,” she said, “it’s an affliction.” She looked furious.

  “Cinder,” I said after a moment. “Could we—do me up sometime? Make me look—I don’t know, like that girl?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to look like that girl, Charlie, honey. Mitchell’s right. She was a boring little thing. You don’t want to look like everybody else anyhow. You’ve got your own looks.”

  “I know,” I said. “But could we fix them?”

  “You’ve got incredible potential, you know, Charlie,” Cinder said. “I could spend hours on you. Sure, O.K., we’ll do the whole thing—clothes, face, hair—”

  “Don’t do anything to her hair.” Mitchell’s voice floated into our conversation with an otherworldly pallor. “It’s soft.”

  “Soft, yeah, but it’s got to get cut or something,” Cinder said.

  “Like Big Bird,” Mitchell added faintly.

  “He’s asleep,” Cinder said.

  “Cinder,” I said, “could I try on that blue dress?”

  “Oh, let’s not get into it today, Charlie,” she said. “I’m so destroyed. You must be exhausted yourself—I’ve kept you for hours. Mitchell, would you take me out to get drunk and disgusting? Then maybe you could take advantage of me, if you could stand it.” Mitchell’s eyes remained closed. “Oh, never mind,” Cinder said. “That was a joke.”

  “Well, goodbye.” I stood up. “See you at home later.”

  “They need any extra roaches at your office?” Cinder asked. At our feet, the plate of pirogi swarmed.

  When I got back to the office, I just sat and sat and my mind kept wandering back to the store. Why was I so sad? After all, Cinder had said I was more interesting than that gleaming girl.

  “Hands off!” a voice said suddenly from behind me.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Bunder,” I said, noticing that my hands were in my hair. Well, it was soft.

  “You look to be, say, in orbit.” As Mr. Bunder sat down on a corner of my desk, the fabric of his trousers pulled against his thigh. It looked extremely uncomfortable, but I couldn’t stop staring at it.

  “Not concentrating, I guess,” I said.

  “Listen.” He leaned in toward me. “Want to get something to drink?”

  “Right now?” I asked. He had a pinkish, stippled look, as if he’d just gotten something to drink.

  We settled down side by side in a booth near the bar. “So you’re worried about your roommate, huh,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, not exactly.” How hard it was to figure out how to say anything to anyone! “Well, actually, though,” I said, “she does get these terrible headaches, but I think they’re from tension in her back. She’s upset about a man she’s been going out with.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll come over and check it out. I give a bad back rub.” Mr. Bunder poked me on the arm. “But seriously,” he said. “There are a lot of hard-noses out there. They get some poor little girl going—it gives them a big boost in the ego department. Then they see something maybe a bit better. Some knockout just sitting at the bar licking her chops. Beautiful women going begging in this city. Dime a dozen.” He kept looking around the room. I wondered if I was sitting too far away from him and he was feeling insulted. On the other hand, perhaps I was sitting too close to him and he was feeling embarrassed.

  “I’ll get us a couple more of these,” he said. “You like the olives, huh?” He held his olive in front of my mouth and I ate it, like a seal. For a moment, I was terribly hungry, but then I thought of the roach-capped pirogi, and I lost my appetite.

  “So what brought you to New York?” he asked.

  “Well…” I said. What had brought me to New York? “I split up with someone in Buffalo.”

  “Busted marriage, huh?” Mr. Bunder said. “Too bad.”

  “Oh, no. It wasn’t a marriage. We were just trying it out.” I searched my mind for something that would be interesting to Mr. Bunder. “He was an assistant professor.” Mr. Bunder blinked. “Well, not that that has anything to do with it,” I said. “But we weren’t very compatible.”

  “Guess not,” Mr. Bunder said. He sighed, looking around, and tapped with his glass on the table.

  “Have you ever been married?” I asked, to be polite.

  “Have I?” Mr. Bunder said. “Yeah. I have. I’m married right now.” I wondered if I should leave. Mr. Bunder didn’t seem to be having a very good time.

  “You know,” he said, perking up. “You look a little like that what’s-her-name—Meryl Streep. You know that? Around the—the—mouth, or something. Olive! Olive!” He held his olive in front of me, but I was committed just then to pushing a little globule of water on the table from one side of my glass around to the other without breaking it up.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “Need another drink?”

  “No, thank you, I’m already drunk,” I said, surprised. “I’m sweating.”

  “Terrific,” Mr. Bunder said. “Well, maybe you want to go sweat at home. Check up on that little roommate of yours. I’ll get you into a taxi before you fall over.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bunder,” I said outside.

  “Call me Dickie, would you?” he said. “When you girls say ‘Mr. Bunder,’ I think you’re talking to my father.”

  I had trouble getting past Mr. Bunder to climb into the taxi he’d hailed for me. Or perhaps he was planning to get into it, too. “Did you want to share this someplace?” I asked.

  “Thanks, honey,” he said, “but I think I’ll hang around here for a while. See if any of the ladies at the bar is interested in an evening of fudge packing.”

  It had been nice of Mr. Bunder to ask me to join him. He must have seen that I was lonel
y, too. I felt sorry for him as I watched him go back into the restaurant by himself. He looked so pink and tender in his bristly little suit, and from behind he seemed to move choppily, as if propelled by warring impulses, like a truffle hound going back to work after a noon break.

  “Where have you been, Charles?” Cinder said to me. “I’ve been desperate.”

  “I was having a drink with Mr. Bunder,” I said.

  “Mr. Bunder!” she said. “Do people still name their kids Mister? Oh, right. He’s one of those cowpats you work for, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, I mean…Oh—Cinder, does ‘fudge packing’ mean something?”

  “What? How should I know?” she said. “Christ, where do you hear this vile shit? Anyhow, listen. I really need your help. If you’d come half an hour later, you probably would have found me in a pool of blood with a machete between my ribs.” She looked at me blankly for a moment. “Between my ribs? Is that what people say? It sounds wrong. ‘Between my ribs,’ ‘among my ribs’—doesn’t ‘between my ribs’ make it sound like you’ve only got two ribs? It’s like people say ‘between my teeth’—‘I’ve got something caught between my teeth’—and it sounds like they’ve only got two teeth. I think you should say, ‘I’ve got something caught among my teeth.’ Well, no, that doesn’t work, either, does it, because you can really only get something caught—oh, weird—between two teeth!”

  “Cinder,” I said, “what happened?”

  “What?” she said. “Oh.”

  It seemed she had called John Paul back, and he’d agreed to come over, but then she’d remembered she already had a date with someone else.

  “Oh,” I said, and looked at her. “So why don’t you call John Paul and say you made a mistake—tell him you can’t see him tonight?”

  “Charlotte,” Cinder said. “We’re talking John Paul here.”

  “Well…” I said. “What about the other guy? Could you call him?”

  “Hmm. I didn’t think of that,” she said. “But anyhow I don’t know how to reach him. I don’t even know his name.”

  “You don’t know his name?”

  “He’s just some guy I met on the street,” she said. “Some Puerto Rican or something.”

  As we looked at each other, concentrating hard, the doorbell rang.

  I crouched next to Cinder at the door, where she was peering through a crack. She plucked me back, but I’d seen a very young man, dark and graceful, in a crisp shirt. “Shit,” Cinder whispered.

  “How many years before someone is older than someone else?” I wrote on a little pad of paper we kept for lists.

  “4 if yr a man 2 if yr a wman,” Cinder wrote back. “But so wht?”

  We sat absolutely still under Robert’s photographed happiness while the footsteps outside the door continued back and forth and the doorbell rang again, and then, as Cinder and I stared at each other in horror, a second set of footsteps mounted the stairs. But it was Mitchell who spoke, not John Paul, and Cinder and I both let out our breath.

  “Hey,” Mitchell said. “Something I can help you with?”

  “I’m a friend of Cinder’s,” the stranger said. “I was supposed to see her tonight, but she doesn’t seem to be home.”

  “That’s weird,” Mitchell said, as Cinder muffled a gasp behind her hands. “She said she’d be in all evening.”

  “Well, if you see her,” the other voice said, “tell her Hector was here.”

  I peeked out and watched the men walk together toward the stairs. How nice men were with each other, how frail and trusting, I was thinking, and just then an explosion of hilarity escaped from behind Cinder’s hands, and the two men halted and turned back toward the door in perfect synchronization. “What was that?” Hector said.

  After a moment of utter motionlessness on both sides of the door, the two men began to discuss the possibilities of marauders, gas leaks, and overdoses, and Mitchell decided to climb over the roof and down the fire escape into Cinder’s room. “If I don’t open the door for you in about fifteen minutes,” he said to Hector, “just chop it down, I guess, or something.”

  Cinder and I scrambled silently back to her room. “This is a catastrophe,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  “Mitchell is so sweet, isn’t he, though,” she said, “to go up over the roof like that. It’s pretty hard. He did it once before, when I flushed my keys down the toilet at some ridiculous party.”

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said. “I mean, it wasn’t on purpose. But he’s the sort of person that would do that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t think he’d climb over any roofs for me,” I said.

  “Mitchell isn’t nice to you?” she said. “God. If I ever saw him not being nice to you, I’d beat him senseless. Oh, I mean, I know he can be sort of a snot sometimes,” she said, “like a lot of those really great-looking men. It’s not like women, you know. We’re brought up to be able to handle being beautiful, but those really beautiful guys are brought up like hothouse flowers, and they’re not taught what to do with all that stuff. They just get superaware of all that potential for, you know, damage, and they get sort of wooden. A lot of them can’t even speak to a woman who isn’t absolutely gorgeous herself. It’s sort of like rich people, or people who are famous—they like their friends to be rich or famous, too, so that everyone understands everyone else on a certain level and no one has to worry about anyone else’s motives.”

  Usually I enjoyed learning things from Cinder, but today everything she said made me feel worse. It wasn’t fair of her, I thought, to call Mr. Bunder a cowpat without knowing him. Of course, she would have called him a cowpat even if she did know him. Robert would have called him a cowpat, too. Well, except that Robert would think that cowpat was a stupid thing to call someone. And actually, come to think of it, Robert wouldn’t like Cinder one bit, either. And Cinder wouldn’t like Robert. Well, Mr. Bunder was always nice to me.

  “And men like Mitchell just worry and worry, you know?” Cinder was saying. “They’re afraid they’ll either be contaminated or unmasked if they get too near a woman who isn’t beautiful. They’re afraid their own beauty is all they have, and that it isn’t really worth anything anyhow, and that it misrepresents their real inner disgustingness, and that they’re going to lose it—all that stuff. Thank God John Paul isn’t like that! He just loves being beautiful. He thinks he deserves to be beautiful, and it’s like he’s got this big present for anyone who happens to be around—drunks on the corner, women with baby carriages, the grocer.”

  The little claim John Paul had staked on my arm asserted itself again, just as, with a huge thud, Mitchell climbed in the window. “Oh, don’t get up,” he said. “I was just passing by.”

  “I’m really sorry, Mitchell,” Cinder said. “I’ll explain all of this later, but right now please, please get out there immediately and grab that kid before he does something really dumb.”

  “When is John Paul supposed to get here?” I asked when Cinder had dispatched Mitchell.

  “Pretty soon. Now, to be precise. But he’s always late,” she said. “Actually, he probably won’t come at all.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he will,” I said. I would have liked to put an arm around Cinder, as she so easily did with me when I talked about Robert, but I could only sit there next to her with my hands in my lap.

  “You know,” she said, “I think I’ve just figured out why men treat me so badly. It’s karma. I really think it is.”

  I could figure out a few things about men myself, I thought. I could figure out, for instance, that men who said you looked a little like Meryl Streep meant that they didn’t find you attractive but they thought someone else might. And I could figure out that men who said you looked like Big Bird or a dinosaur skeleton didn’t think anyone would find you attractive.

  “You’re lucky that you’re so nice,” Cinder said. “Men are going to treat you really well in y
our next life.”

  “You know what?” I said after a moment. “I think Mitchell and Hector are in the kitchen.”

  “Jesus,” Cinder said. “You’re right! What on earth is Mitchell doing, that maniac!”

  “Does he know that John Paul’s supposed to come over?” I asked.

  “Good point. I guess I didn’t get a chance to mention it.” She sucked air in through her teeth. “Well, Charles,” she said. “It’s up to you now.”

  “No!” I said. “What do you mean? I can’t!”

  “You’ve got to, Charlotte,” Cinder said.

  I shut Cinder’s door carefully behind me and explained to the two men who were sitting comfortably at the table drinking beer that Cinder needed to be left utterly alone. “She says she feels like—like—there’s a machete in her head.”

  “Probably a brain tumor,” Mitchell said, taking a sip of his beer.

  “Should we call a doctor?” Hector said to me. He looked more solid at close range than he had out in the hall. He must have been twenty or twenty-one. “Or take her to the hospital?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, this happens all the time. The only thing to do is let her rest.”

  “Well, I guess so. Listen—” Hector said. He wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Here’s my phone number. Could you ask her please to give me a call sometime when she’s feeling better?”

  Downstairs, Mitchell nodded and walked off, leaving me to go in the opposite direction with Hector. I wanted to say good night to Hector, but we were in the middle of the block, so if I did say good night I would have to continue with him afterward, which would seem peculiar, or else I would have to turn and go back in the direction from which we’d just come, which would seem…well, also peculiar. So I decided I would say good night at the corner.

  At the corner, Hector turned to me. “Want to get something to eat?”

  Something to eat! I was just walking with him to get him out of the apartment! “I guess not,” I said. I turned to face him. “Thanks anyway…I really am hungry.”

  “Well,” Hector said, “come on, then. There’s a good place a couple of blocks away.”