The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “I suppose,” I said. “But ‘preferable alternative’ hardly seems, in itself, the answer to one’s prayers. At least all those minefield marriages around us must have something in them to make them explosive.”

  “Probably incompatibility,” Rafe pointed out. “On the other hand, I never really did understand why you married John.”

  “He’s not so bad,” I said. I reminded Rafe that John was in many ways an exemplary husband. “He’s highly respected, he has marvelous taste, he’s very good looking in a harmless sort of way, he’s rich to begin with and makes good money on top of that…”

  “No, I know,” Rafe said. “I didn’t mean to insult him. He’s a very nice guy, after all. And I have to say you looked terrific together. It’s just that—well, you never seemed to have much fun with him.”

  “Fun?” I said. “How do you expect the poor guy to be fun? He’s not even alive.”

  Rafe looked suddenly stricken, as if he’d realized he might have left his wallet somewhere. I wondered what he was thinking about, but I didn’t want to pry, so I went on. “Have you heard he’s been seeing Marcia Meaver? They’re probably sitting around together right this minute, wowing each other with forbidden tales of investment banking.”

  “She’s quite nice, though,” Rafe said after a moment. “I’ve met her.”

  “Oh, I suppose she is,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be nasty.”

  “I know,” Rafe said. “I know you didn’t.”

  We ordered brandies and leaned back against the leather, considering. I was just getting bored when Rafe hunched forward, peering into his glass.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Ah, well. I guess it just doesn’t do, does it, to marry someone on the strength of their credentials.”

  “Oh, good point, Rafe,” I said. “How ever did you think of it?”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “You’re really crazy about this girl, aren’t you?” I said.

  Then, oddly enough, Rafe just laughed, and his sunny self shone out from behind his strange mood. “I know,” he said, “I know. I always say, ‘This time it’s different, this time it’s different,’ but you know what? Each time, poor girls, it is different.” And Rafe looked so pleased with himself and his girls, so confident of my approval—his smile was so heedless, so winning, so his—that, well, I was simply forced to smile back.

  Smile or no, though, this girl had obviously had an effect on Rafe, and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to tune in on her show to see if I could pick her out from among her fellow soap girls. So the next morning I picked up a TV Guide on my way home from exercise class and scanned it for “This Brief Candle.” I always did my work in the afternoons (we members of the grants committee of the foundation worked separately until after we had made our initial recommendations to the panel), and I had a lunch date at one, so I was pleased to find that the show aired at eleven.

  When I turned on the set, a few cats wavered into view and discussed cat food, and then, after an awe-inspiring chord or two, an hour in the lives of the characters of “This Brief Candle” was revealed to the world. During this hour, a girl I later came to know as Ellie confided to her mother that she suspected her boyfriend of cheating on an exam in order to get into medical school to please his father. Then Colleen, apparently a school counselor of some sort, made a phone call to a person who seemed to be the father—no, the stepfather—of another person, named Stevie. She wished to talk to him, she said, about Stevie’s performance. Ominous music suggested that Stevie’s performance was either remarkably poor or a mere pretext for Colleen to see Stevie’s stepfather. Perhaps Stevie and Ellie’s boyfriend were one and the same person! No, surely this Stevie fellow must be far too young. But, on the other hand—

  Well, no time to mull that over: two men, Hank and Brent, I gathered, were parking a car outside a house and hoping that they would not arouse the suspicions of Eric, who, it seemed, was someone inside the house; Eric could not be made nervous, they told each other between heavy, charged silences, if they were ever going to get inside and break into his safe for those papers.

  Oop! An office materialized, containing a devastatingly attractive silver-haired gentleman. Eric? Ellie’s father? Stevie’s stepfather? Aha! Not Ellie’s father, because Ellie’s mother walked in and said, “Forgive me for coming here like this, Mr. Armstrong, but I must speak to you right away about the plans for the new power plant.” And surely Ellie’s mother would not go around calling this man “Mr. Armstrong” if he were Ellie’s father. Although she might, come to think of it, under certain circumstances, because, for instance, I couldn’t help noticing that Mr. Armstrong’s secretary was sitting right there with a very funny look on her face. (But wait: plans are something that could fit in a safe! And maybe Mr. Armstrong’s secretary looked like that because she was in cahoots with Hank or Brent. Or Eric, for that matter.) “Come in here, Cordelia, where we can talk privately,” said Mr. Armstrong, escorting Ellie’s mother into an interior office. (“Cordelia,” when she called him “Mr. Armstrong”? Oh, sure.) “Hold my calls, please, Tracy,” he said to his secretary. “Certainly, Mr. Armstrong,” Tracy said, the funny look solidifying on her face. No, clearly it was something about Mr. Armstrong, not some old safe, that had caused Tracy to look like that.

  Here was someone named Carolyn being kissed passionately by a man in a suit. “Oh, Shad, Shad,” she said. Shad? Why Shad? “Chad, my darling,” Carolyn continued, wisely abandoning her attempt to kiss him while saying her lines. “Carolyn, Carolyn,” said Chad, I suppose it was (although, come to think of it, I’d never heard of anyone called Chad, either). “Chad,” said Carolyn. “Carolyn,” said Chad. “Lydia!” said both Chad and Carolyn, breaking apart, as the camera drew back to reveal a woman standing in a doorway. “Well. My dear little sister,” said this new woman, coolly. “And good old Chad. Aren’t you going to welcome me home, you two? I’ve come back. And this time I’ve come back to stay.”

  “So!” I said when I got through to Rafe at his office. “I just saw ‘This Brief Candle’—what’s your crush’s name?”

  “Heather Goldberg,” he said.

  “What?” I said. “Oh. Her nom, not her name.”

  “How should I know?” Rafe said. “I can’t watch that stuff—I’m employed.”

  “Well, how might I identify her?”

  “She’s the pretty one,” he said.

  I snorted. They were all pretty, of course, in a uniform fashion, like an assortment of chocolates whose ornamentations seem meaningless to nonaficionados.

  “Why don’t you bring her by for a drink this evening?” I said.

  “Can’t,” Rafe said.

  “Come on,” I said. “I promise to put away the magnifying glass, the scales, the calipers…”

  “Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin,” Rafe said. “Just kidding, of course—I’d love to. But anyway, you’ll meet her at Cookie’s next Thursday.”

  “Cookie’s!” I said. “Oh, God, that’s right. I’m dreading it.” I hate parties. Particularly Cookie’s parties, but Louise Dietz had just published a volume of photographs of investigative reporters at home, which was the ostensible raison d’être of this do, so I had to put in an appearance at least.

  “Whoop—my other line,” Rafe said. “Want to hold?”

  “No, darling. I’m frantic. Thursday, then.” I hung up and looked around. It had been nice with the TV on. All those other people seeing exactly the same thing as oneself, at the same time—one knew exactly where one was, somehow. It seemed a flawless form of having company. But it was over so suddenly.

  I had things to do before lunch, but time was standing completely still, as it does occasionally at that hour. Then one’s day will pass unexpectedly into a giant, permeable block of sunshine that converts surfaces into hypnotic sheets of light and drenches one’s belongings in a false, puzzling specialness. I hated it—it was terrible. I simply stood in front of t
he TV, wrenched out of the ordinary smooth flow of entire minutes, and I remembered being home from school as a child, pinioned to my bed by the measles or whatever, while the world blazed beyond me in that noon glare.

  When I got to Cookie’s on Thursday, Rafe and Heather had not yet arrived. In fact, no one much had yet arrived, so I wandered about the shrubbery in Cookie’s living room looking for a hospitable encampment. Eventually I distinguished Marcia Meaver’s name in a stream of syllables that issued from some source not far from me. Naturally, my curiosity was aroused. What was there to be mentioned about Marcia Meaver? Except, of course, that she was going out with my husband. Which, I must admit, did annoy me. It’s one thing, after all, when one’s husband takes up with a fascinating woman or a woman of great beauty. But Marcia Meaver! I felt I would have to rethink those years of my marriage—John’s standards were not, I realized, all that one might have supposed them to be.

  I followed the voice I’d overheard, and it led me to a rather clammy blond boy. As I stood at his shoulder, listening, I came to understand that this boy worked under Buddy Katsukoru at the museum, and it was to Buddy that he was now praising himself, fulsomely and with riveting dullness, for having convinced Marcia to make to the museum a tax-deductible gift of some gowns.

  “I will remember this,” I said. “I’ve been giving my old clothes to the Salvation Army.”

  “Schiaparelli,” the boy said dimly, without even turning to glance at me.

  “Good grief!” Cookie trumpeted from behind us, incidentally saving the boy from the heartbreak of my response. “It’s Lydia!”

  “Heather, actually,” said a girl’s voice, and I turned and saw Rafe, and—and—and I couldn’t figure out what I saw for a moment; but sure enough, if you were to exchange, paper-doll fashion, this girl’s dashing suede for one of those demure TV-tart dresses, her calm regard for the shiftings of a tense, hectoring flirt, if you were to paint sharp black lines around this girl’s eyes, what I saw, I realized, would in fact be Lydia, the femme fatale, as I’d supposed, of “This Brief Candle.”

  How interesting. I was eager to take Heather aside and let her share with me her feelings about exploring on a daily basis some dingy side of her personality, but Cookie cut in like a sheepdog and led her off. “Come tell me, dear,” Cookie shouted tactlessly, “what it’s like to be a bitch!”

  “Imagine Cookie needing to ask,” I heard the blond boy say as he and Buddy floated toward the bar. Well! Isn’t that just absolutely Mr. Guest for you, though! Trashing the hostess the instant she’s out of earshot! Cookie might not be the sweetest person in the world, it was true, but she would never do something cheap like that herself!

  “So how’s the whiz biz?” Rafe asked as he and I settled ourselves into the sofa. “Find any geniuses crawling around under that pile of grant proposals?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Oh, it is slow work, no question.”

  “Oh, by the way,” Rafe said, “Heather and I finally got to that performance piece for which you people so thoughtfully provided the funding. The one with the four-hundred-piece glass-harmonica orchestra, where the mechanical whale rolls over for a few hours. Beached, isn’t it called? It was really great, I have to tell you, we really enjoyed it.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t care for it, Rafe. And if what you saw had been in fact what you describe, I would hardly blame you. But whether you personally did or did not care for it, the piece you refer to certainly must be considered an important piece. What are those—nachos? No thank you, Rafe. Really—a major piece.”

  “You know,” Rafe said. “All these years, I’ve really wanted to ask you, how do you decide whether something really is a major piece or whether it’s a major piece of crap? I mean, seriously, how do you decide whether something is good or not?”

  “Well, seriously, Rafe, I decide in the same way that I decide whether Bergdorf’s is a good place to shop. I decide in the same way that I decide on which wall to put the Ansel Adams that you so admire. I decide these things by decision-making processes.”

  “Ah, silly me,” Rafe said.

  “Really, Rafe. I can’t imagine what it is about Cookie’s soirée that’s inspired you to disburden yourself, finally, of this canker of doubt you say you’ve harbored for so long. But if you must really hear right now how I can tell whether something is good, I’ll explain it to you. The explanation is that I have been trained to do just that. Oh, of course I do have a certain natural eye—and ear—as, obviously, do you. But what you so clearly find to be a sort of sanctified caprice on my part, concerning my funding recommendations, is actually considered, systematic judgment. I’m not saying I could describe its sequence to you, but I have a solid background in the fine arts, as you know. I studied English and art history in school, and I’ve worked for years in art-related fields. And therefore, I’m qualified to make the judgments I make in the same way that…that, well, Mike Dundy over there is qualified to design the cars he designs.”

  “I take your point,” Rafe said.

  “Good,” I said.

  “But it does not suffice to answer my question,” he said. “You see, if you were to drive around in a car of Mike’s design, and the engine fell out, everyone could agree that there was a flaw in that design.”

  “Rafe,” I said—I simply couldn’t believe this! In all the time we’d known each other, Rafe had never indicated any distaste for my profession—“I am not saying that my work is a science. It cannot be. I am not saying that I’m infallible. All I’m saying is this: I’m not a profoundly gifted person myself. I’m a person whose small but very specific gifts and whose very specific training suit me for this task—the task of being able to seek out, with great care and a certain…actual precision, and to reward, others who are profoundly gifted.”

  “And here I thought it was all glamour and prestige. There’s quite a lot of kicking and biting for those jobs, I understand, among folks who don’t rightly appreciate the gravity of the trust, or the backbreaking labor involved in carrying it out.”

  “Well, I didn’t have to kick or bite anyone for my job. I was merely appointed. And you know perfectly well that ‘glamorous’ is the last thing I find it! Trudging across that great tundra of manuscripts! Of course, you do learn how to, well…”

  “Skim,” Rafe said.

  “Certainly not!” I said. “Just to—to read for the worthwhile bits. And I admit that it’s very gratifying when you do stumble across something good. And once in a while, you do. You really do. You see, that’s the thrill of the job for me, when that happens, and you know that here’s someone who’s going to be an important voice. Rafe, I’m sure this sounds pompous to you, but sometimes I’m reading the Arts and Leisure section or whatever, and there will be an article about someone we’ve encouraged—did you see, by the way, that there were three whole pages on Stanley Zifkin’s studio in this issue of Architectural Digest?—Anyhow, I see these things, and I feel a sense of, well…”

  “Ownership,” Rafe said. “The sixth sense.”

  “You’re very jolly tonight, aren’t you?” I said.

  “I’m a jolly good fellow. Ah, there,” he said. Heather, having been released at last by Cookie, was coming toward us.

  “What’s happening in the real world?” Rafe asked her.

  “Oh, just taking in the sights. All these people. It’s so funny. Parties always make me think how funny it is that everything’s all divided up into these different packages. A package of Cookie, a package of you, a package of me. When you see people all together, milling around like this, it seems so, sort of, arbitrary.”

  “It doesn’t seem arbitrary to me at all,” I said. “Cookie’s Cookie, and I’m not, thank heaven. Anyhow, what do you mean, ‘everything’? What’s this ‘everything’ that’s divided into me and Cookie?”

  Heather shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Just everything. And what else is funny is that at every single party I’ve ever been to, every single person I speak to says how much
they hate parties.”

  Rafe nodded. “Hatred of parties. The sentiment that unites all humanity.”

  “But we’re all here,” Heather said.

  “That’s right,” Rafe told her. “It’s a job that has to be done. Going to parties is the social analogue of carrying out the garbage.”

  “Well, anyhow,” Heather said, “everyone seems to be having fun. Cookie’s nice, isn’t she?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, she is, really, if you look deep enough. She can be very vicious, but underneath she’s a fine person, really. She has principles at least, which is more than can be said for a lot of rich people.” Something was tugging at my attention. “Jesus,” I said. “Look at Geoffrey Berman’s jacket! It’s hairy. One of his research assistants must have grown it for him in a bottle.”

  “They’re certainly crazy about him, aren’t they?” Rafe said absently. Obviously, he was paying no attention at all to what I was saying.

  “So—um, what does Cookie…apply her principles to?” Heather asked.

  Rafe laughed.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “They’re just something one has.”

  “Yes?” Heather said. “It sounds so…inert, sort of. Like a stack of fish on a plate.”

  “Fish on a plate!” I said. God, I was hungry. “Do you suppose there’s anything edible within reach?”

  We threaded our way around a nest of journalists who were disclosing to each other their coastal preferences, and reached the buffet table just in time to catch the gratifying sight of Buddy’s friend spilling enchilada sauce on Cookie’s Aubusson. Really, Cookie had never served more annoying food. Last year it had been julienned Asiatic unidentifiables; the year before that it was all reheated morels en croûte étouffés avec canard aux fraises poivrées kind of thing; and this year, Spam, it seemed, was more or less our lot. “And with her money,” I said. “I really don’t know what I’d do if I had Cookie’s money.”

  “You could buy Cookie’s sofa,” Heather said. “That’s what I’d do.”