The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  What was it that Puerto Ricans ate, I wondered as I walked along beside Hector, but the restaurant we entered was Italian, with pictures of harbors and flowers and entertainers overlapping on the walls, and cloths and glass-stoppered bottles of dark wine on the tables, around which sat large men and handsome, glistening women, all talking and laughing. It seemed, in fact, as if each table were a little boat, bobbing along on the hubbub of pleasure.

  Hector and I were seated at our own table, and Hector got us outfitted with glasses for the wine, and a huge platter of vegetables—a whole fried harvest—and I felt that we ourselves had pulled anchor and were setting off like the others into that open expanse.

  But then I was staring straight at a gold chain Hector wore. How had I come to be here with this person, I wondered. Yet the links lay flat along his neck, as sleek and secure as a stripe on some strange animal. “I’m sorry about Cinder,” I said.

  Hector glanced away from me. “Everyone gets headaches at one time or another.”

  What did he mean? “Actually,” I said, “I have a headache myself now. It must be because I got drunk this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon?” Hector said.

  “It was a mistake,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “So was that Cinder’s boyfriend?”

  “Oh, heavens, no,” I said. “Mitchell’s just a friend. Actually, I never really thought about it before, but I suppose he is really quite attracted to Cinder. But you know what?” The words were forming themselves before I had a chance to think about them. “I don’t think he’s interested in women. I mean, in being involved with them.” Why had I said such a thing? Hector would want to talk about Cinder, not Mitchell.

  “I had a cousin like that,” Hector said. “He liked girls pretty well, but he didn’t want any girlfriends. He didn’t like other boys, like a lot of boys do. But he wore drag all the time. Pretty dresses, silk underwear, you know? He was very nice. Everybody liked him, but he was about the strangest one in my family.”

  The waiter moved our vegetables over to make room for vast dishes of spaghetti and sausage.

  “What happened to him?” I asked. “Your cousin.”

  “Oh, he’s O.K.,” Hector said. “He grew out of it. It was just a teenage thing for him. But he still doesn’t go out much with girls. Hey, this stuff is good, isn’t it? He teaches physical education in Pittsburgh now.”

  We took a long time with our spaghetti, while Hector told me more about his family. It sounded as if they were fond of each other. And he told me about an information-theory class he was taking. “Are you studying?” he asked me.

  “I’m finished now. I’m a lot older than you.” I looked straight at Hector. I wanted to make sure he understood that I wasn’t trying to make him think that I was his age, that the fact that he was a lot younger than I was was of no interest to me. It was Robert, after all, I wasn’t good enough for.

  “Dessert and coffee?” the waiter asked before Hector could respond. “Or have you lost your appetite?”

  “That’s right.” Hector gestured toward my plate as the waiter cleared it away. “You did pretty good, for a girl.”

  When we were finished, Hector asked, “So do you like to go dancing?”

  For an instant, Robert commandeered the air in front of me. He sat with his feet on his desk, leaning back and smiling. “Flattered?” he asked.

  “Oh, no!” I said.

  “Too bad,” Hector said. “I know a good place uptown.”

  “No.” I got to my feet quickly. “I didn’t mean I didn’t want to go dancing—I meant I didn’t not want to go dancing.” I was breathing hard as I looked at him, as if I’d run to catch up with him.

  “That’s what you meant, huh?” he said. “Far out.” But he grinned as he stood, and he stretched, letting one arm fall around me in a comradely manner.

  Oh, it felt good to dance. I hadn’t gone dancing since Robert and I had started being unhappy. Hector knew a lot of people in the place we’d come to, and we stopped and talked with them. They spoke to Hector in Spanish, but when Hector put a defending hand on my shoulder and answered in English everyone else switched into English, too, except for a tiny dark star of a girl who continued in Spanish with Hector in a husky baby voice. “Her cousin in Queens has a ’62 Corvette that I want,” Hector told me. “And she says he’s thinking about selling it to me.”

  He bought us Cokes and finished his own in one motion, while I watched his head tilt back and his throat work. “You don’t do drugs?” I said.

  “I stay away from that stuff, mostly.” He looked very serious. “It seems like you can do a lot of things behind it, but that’s an illusion, see. I had a good friend, a heavy user, who died. Everyone thought he was a very happy guy. You see people, you talk to them—their faces say one thing, you never know what’s inside.” For a moment, he seemed almost incandescent, but then he smiled impatiently toward the room, laying aside his trustful seriousness. “Anyhow,” he said, “I like to keep in shape.” The gold around his neck winked, and I looked away quickly.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” I fought through the dancers and sat down near the wall. When I closed my eyes, I felt private for a moment, but when I opened them I was looking straight into the whole, huge crowd, right to where Hector was standing, listening attentively to the tiny dark girl. He looked dignified and brotherly as she smiled up at him, but then, suddenly, he flared into a laugh of pure appreciation.

  In the ladies’ room, I held a wet paper towel against my forehead while a herd of girls jostled and giggled around me. Keep in shape, I thought. What had that meant! Had I been expected to admire him? Who was Hector, anyway? What on earth did he think I was doing there with him? Did he think I was attracted to him? And why had I chattered on with him so during dinner? He was just some kid my roommate had picked up on the street! I was wearing, the mirror reminded me, the same nasty office dress I’d been wearing when I sat next to Mr. Bunder light-years earlier in the day. Hector belonged with that girl who was flirting with him, or with Cinder, not with me, and I knew that just as much as he could ever know that, and if he had wanted to prove something to, or because of, Cinder, he had certainly picked the wrong person to prove it with.

  When I got to the exit I glanced back and saw Hector in the throng, struggling toward me. And although because of the music I couldn’t hear him, I could see that he was calling my name. I stood in the cool air outside and closed the door slowly against the throbbing room, watching, like a scientist watching the demise of an experiment, as Hector’s expression changed from surprise to consternation to…what? Was he enraged? Affronted? Relieved?

  On the subway, I thought how if Hector had been there with me, if we had been heading downtown together, tired out from dancing, we would have looked aligned. His restful, measuring regard as he leaned back against the wall of the car would have been matched by mine, and our arms would have been close enough so that I could feel the dissipating heat from his against my much paler, thinner one.

  There was a group of girls balancing at one of the car’s center poles. They were slight and black-haired, like the girl Hector had been talking to, and like her they had long, brilliant nails. Their wrists were marvelously fragile, and their feet, in shiny leather, were like little hooves. I had never asked to compete with such girls, I thought, fuming.

  I wanted to be alone when I got back to the apartment, but Mitchell was in the kitchen, pushing something around on a little hand mirror with a straw, and Cinder was lying on the floor in the peacock-blue dress.

  “The dress with the bad seam!” I said.

  “Madame wishes another snootful?” Mitchell asked, offering Cinder the mirror.

  “Christ, no.” Cinder turned over and groaned. “What is that stuff, anyhow?”

  “Drug du jour,” Mitchell said. “It was on sale.”

  “Oh, Mitchell, Jesus,” she said. Mitchell had been right. She looked even better in that dress than
the girl in the store had.

  “Charlie,” she said, turning to me. I could see that she had been crying. “Listen. Let me ask you something. Do men always tell you that you’re really great in bed? That you’re the best?”

  Only an instant escaped before I knew what to answer. “Always,” I said. “They always say that.”

  “They are so sick,” she said. “What a bunch of sickos.”

  “Guess you had a bad time with John Paul,” I said, even though I really didn’t want to hear about it.

  “That about sums it up,” she said. “See that stuff on the floor? That used to be my gorgeous ceramic bowl. I really wish you’d been here, Charlie. I needed you.”

  “I was needed by you elsewhere,” I said. “Remember Hector?”

  “Hector?” she said. “What were you doing with Hector?”

  “What was I doing with Hector?” I said. “How should I know what I was doing with Hector! I was doing you a favor, that’s what I was doing with Hector!”

  “Charlie,” Cinder said. “What’s the matter? Are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad at you,” I said. “Just don’t call me that name, please. It’s a man’s name. My name is Charlotte.”

  “Come on,” Cinder said. “Let’s have it. Tell Cinder why you’ve got a hair across your ass.”

  “I do not have a hair across my ass,” I said. “whatever that means. I do not have a hair across my ass in any way. It’s just that I got Hector out of here so you could see John Paul and then you don’t even say, ‘Thank you, Charlotte. I really appreciate that.’”

  “Thank you, Charlotte. I really appreciate that,” Cinder said. “Charlie—Sorry. Charlotte. Listen. You’re my best friend. What point would there be in my saying, ‘Oh, thank you, Charlotte,’ every time you did anything for me? You do thousands of things for me.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Just like I do thousands of things for you. I mean, you know that I do things for you because I care about you and because I want to, not because I feel like I have to or because I want you to owe me anything. So you don’t have to say, ‘Thank you, Cinder, for letting me come live with you when I had no place else to go…Thank you, Cinder, for dragging me around with you everywhere and introducing me to all your friends.’ I know you feel gratitude toward me, just like I feel gratitude toward you. But that’s not the point.”

  “Well, I know,” I said. What point? “But still.”

  “And anyhow,” she said, “I did ask you to get that guy out of the apartment, but I didn’t ask you to spend the rest of your life with him. What did you do, anyhow?”

  “We had dinner,” I said.

  “Dinner! How hilarious!”

  “I don’t see why,” I said. “People eat dinner every night. Besides, I had to do something with him. And then”—oh, so what, I thought—“we went dancing.”

  “Oh, unbelievable!” Cinder said. “I can just see it. One of those places full of little Latino girls in pressed jeans and heels, boys covered with jewelry…”

  “That’s—” I said. “That’s—” I tried to seize the sensation that rippled under my hand, of gold against Hector’s skin as he drank his Coke and laughed with the girl, but the sensation dried, leaving me with only the empty image.

  “One of those places where everyone does this super-structured dancing, one of those places with putrid airwave rock…” Cinder said.

  “One of those places where everyone’s bilingual,” I said. “Besides, you were going to go out with him yourself.”

  “Go out with him, yeah, but not, like, necessarily into public. I mean, God, Charlie—Charlotte—you were so nice to him!”

  “Actually,” I said, and a thought froze me where I stood, “he was nice to me.” I looked at Cinder in horror, seeing the distress on Hector’s face as I’d shut the door against him and the roomful of dancers. “He was nice to me, and I just left him there.”

  “Well,” Cinder said. “He’ll live.”

  “I might have hurt his feelings,” I said. “It was a mean thing to do.”

  “Well, it wasn’t really mean,” Cinder said. “Besides, you’re right. It was me he asked out, not you.”

  My brain started to revolve inside my skull, tumbling its inventory. “I’m going to call him and apologize,” I said, rummaging through my pocket for the piece of paper with his number on it.

  “God,” Cinder said, looking at me. “He gave you his number?”

  “To tell you the truth—” I said. And then I couldn’t say anything else for several seconds. “He gave me his number for you. He wanted you to call him.”

  “Charlotte,” Cinder said, rolling over. “You liked him.”

  “He’s a perfectly nice man,” I snapped. “I neither liked nor disliked him.”

  “Man?” Cinder said. “He’s probably just barely gone through some puberty rite where he had to spear a sow or something.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “He’s studying computer engineering. And you know what, Cinder? You’re a racist—”

  “Racist!” she said. “Now, where is that coming from?”

  “That’s right,” I said, “you think you can say these idiotic things about him because he’s a Puerto Rican. You don’t take him seriously because he’s a Puerto Rican—”

  “It is not because he’s a Puerto Rican!” she said.

  “Not because he’s a Puerto Rican,” Mitchell echoed, and Cinder and I swiveled at the sound of his voice. “Not because he’s a Puerto Rican. Because he’s like a Puerto Rican. He’s a Cuban.”

  “Cuban!” Cinder and I said in unison.

  “At least, that’s what he told me,” Mitchell said. “When we were waiting for Cinder.” Mitchell’s eyes moved from Cinder to me and back again while we stared at him. His face looked white and slippery, like a bathroom tile. “Hector,” he said finally. “You mean the guy who was here before. The Cuban.”

  “The Cuban!” Cinder whooped. “That’s right—the Cuban, Charlie! Who’s the racist now, huh?”

  “Why don’t you get off the floor?” I said. “You’re getting stuff all over that dress.”

  “Come on, Charlotte,” Cinder said, but she stood up, and for an instant she looked terribly uncertain. “I really don’t see why you’re getting so crazy about this. This is just funny.”

  Funny, I thought. It was funny.

  But it wasn’t that funny. “There isn’t a thing wrong with that dress, is there?” I said. “Besides—” I took a breath. “Hector didn’t think I looked like a dinosaur skeleton—”

  “Dinosaur skeleton?” Cinder said. “What on earth are you talking about, Charlotte? Why would anybody think you look like a dinosaur skeleton? I really don’t know what your problem is. You act like everyone’s trying to kill you. You sit there with your mouth open and your finger in your nose like you don’t know anything and you can’t understand anything and you can’t do anything and you want me to tell you what’s going on all the time. But that’s not what you want at all. You don’t really care what I think. You don’t care what Mitchell thinks. You just like to make people think you’re completely pathetic, and then everyone feels absolutely horrible so you don’t really have to pay any attention to anybody. You’re like one of those things that hang upside down from trees pretending to be dead so no one will shoot it! You’re an awful friend!”

  I stared at Cinder.

  Good heavens, yes.

  But it was too late for me to do anything about being a bad friend. I stared and stared at Cinder’s unhappy little face, and then I grabbed my suitcase from the closet and started sweeping things into it from the shelves. Oh, and Mr. Bunder! Hector! Cinder was right. I flooded with shame.

  “Charlotte—” Cinder said, but there was nothing else I needed to know, and I scooped my stuff off the shelves and threw it into my suitcase as if I’d been visited by a power. “Charlotte—I’m sorry. I just meant you have a low self-opinion. You should try to be more positive about yo
urself.”

  “You’d better see if Mitchell’s all right,” I said, glancing around to see if there was anything I’d forgotten. “I don’t think he is.”

  “Mitchell,” Cinder said, “are you all right?”

  “I just don’t feel like talking right now,” Mitchell said.

  “Oh, great,” Cinder said. “What a great evening. One friend crashing around like Joan Crawford, and the other fried to a fucking crisp. Come on, Charlotte. Just let’s calm down and put your stuff away. John Paul will probably show up any minute to apologize, and he hates a mess.”

  And, Lord—I’d almost forgotten my photograph of Robert. What was it doing up there anyway—as if he were the president of some company? I yanked it from the wall with both hands, and it tore in half. “Oh, Charlotte,” Cinder said. But, to my surprise, I didn’t care. Robert had never looked like that picture anyhow. That was how I’d wanted him to look, but he hadn’t looked like that.

  “O.K., everyone,” Cinder said. “Let’s just be like normal people now, O.K.? Let’s just relax and have a beer or something. Beer, Mitchell?” she asked, holding a bottle out to him, but he seemed to be listening for a distant signal.

  “Charlotte,” she said. “Beer?” But I, too, was busy elsewhere, and I didn’t turn when she said, “Shit. Well, cheers,” to see her tilt back the bottle herself, trying to make it look as if everything were completely under control. Well, she could try to make it look like that, she could try to make anything look like anything she wanted, but right then I just wanted everything to look like itself, whatever it might be. And I remember so clearly that moment, standing there astride my suitcase, with a part of that photograph of Robert in each hand, my legs trembling and my heart racing with a dark exultation, as if I’d just, in the grace of an instant, been thrown wide of some mortal danger.

  What It Was Like, Seeing Chris

  While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time then I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.