The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

The man stood. “Going on a trip?”

  “Soon,” I said.

  “Well, give me a call when you get back,” he said. “If you want to.”

  “I’m not sure that I’ll be coming back,” I said.

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he said, nodding, as if I were telling him a long story. “Well, then, good luck.”

  I flew up early one morning, leaving my apartment while it was still dark outside. I had packed, and flooded my plant with water in a hypocritical gesture that would delay, but not prevent, its death, and then I’d sat waiting for the clock face to arrive at the configuration that meant it was time I could reasonably go.

  The airport was shaded and still in the pause before dawn, and the scattering of people there seemed to have lived for days in flight’s distended light or dark; for them, this stop was no more situated in space than a dream is.

  How many planes and buses and trains I had taken, over the years, to see Ivan! And how inevitable it always felt, as if I were being conveyed to him by some law of the universe made physical.

  We’d met when I was nineteen, in Atlanta, where I was working for a photographic agency. He lived with his wife, Linda, who had grown up there, and their one-year-old, Gary. But he traveled frequently, and when he would call and ask me to go with him or meet him for a weekend somewhere—well, Ivan was one of those men, and just standing next to him I felt as if I were standing in the sun, and it never occurred to me to hesitate or to ask any questions.

  And Ivan warmed with me. After their early marriage, Linda had grown increasingly fearful and demanding, he told me, and years of trying to work things out with her had imposed on him the cautious reserve of an unwilling guardian. It was a habit he seemed eager to discard.

  After a time, there was a divorce, and Ivan moved about from place to place, visiting and taking photographs, and I got a job in New York. But he would call, and I would lock the door of whatever apartment I was living in and go to him in strange cities, leaving each before I could break through the transparent covering behind which it lay, mysterious and inert. And I always felt the same when I saw Ivan—like an animal raised in captivity that, after years of caged, puzzled solitude, is instantly recalled by the touch of a similar creature to the natural blazing consciousness of its species.

  The last time we were together, though, we had lain on a slope overlooking a sunny lake, and a stem trembled in my hand while I explained, slowly and quietly, that it would not do any longer. I was twenty-eight now, I said, and he would have to make some sort of decision about me.

  “Are you talking about a decision that can be made honestly?” He held my chin up and looked into my eyes.

  “That is what a decision is,” I said. “If the next step is self-evident, we don’t call it a decision.”

  “I don’t want to be unfair,” he said, finally. And I came to assume, because I hadn’t heard from him since, that the decision had been made.

  Soft winter light was rolling up onto the earth as the plane landed, and the long corridors of the airport reflected a mild, dark glow.

  An official opened my suitcase and turned over a stack of my underpants. SOMETHING TO DECLARE…NOTHING TO DECLARE, I saw on signs overhead, and strange words below each message. Oh, yes—part of this city was English-speaking, part French-speaking. A sorry-looking Christmas wreath hung over the lobby, and I thought of something Ivan had said after one of his frequent trips to see Gary and Linda in Atlanta: “I can’t really have much sympathy for her. When she senses I’m not as worried about her as she’d like me to be, she takes a slight, semiaccidental overdose of something or gets herself into a little car crash.”

  “She loves you that much?” I asked.

  “It isn’t love,” he said. “For all her dependence, she doesn’t love me.”

  “But,” I said, “is that what she thinks? Does she think she loves you that much?”

  He stood up and stretched, and for a moment I thought that he hadn’t registered my question. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what she thinks.”

  Near the airport exit, there was a currency-exchange bureau, and I understood that I would need new money. The man behind the cage counted out the variegated, colorful Canadian bills in front of me. “Ah,” he said, noticing my expression—he spoke with a faint but unfamiliar accent—“an unaccustomed medium of exchange, yes?”

  I was directed by strangers to a little bus that took me across a plain to the city, a stony outcropping perched at the cold top of the world. There were solitary houses, heavy in the shallow film of light, and rows of low buildings, and many churches. I found a taxi and circumvented the question of language by handing the driver a piece of paper with Ivan’s address on it, and I was brought in silence to a dark, muscular Victorian house that loomed from a brick street in a close row with others of its kind.

  Ivan came downstairs bringing the morning gold with him and let me in. His skin and hair were wheat and honey colors, and he smelled as if he had been sleeping in a sunny field. “Ivan,” I said, taking pleasure in speaking his name. As he held me, I felt ebbing from me a terrible pain that I had been unaware of until that moment. “I’m so tired.”

  “Want to wake up, or want to go to sleep?” he said.

  “Sleep,” I said, but for whole minutes I couldn’t bring myself to move.

  Upstairs, the morning light, gathering strength, made the melting frost on the bedroom window glow. I slept as if I hadn’t slept for a week, and then awoke, groping hurriedly through my life to place myself. Understanding, I looked out the window through the city night shine of frost: I was in Montreal with Ivan, and I had missed the day.

  I stood in the doorway of the living room for a moment, looking. Ivan was there, sharing a bottle of wine with two women. One of them was striking and willowy, with a spill of light curls, and the other was small and dark and fragile-looking. When had Ivan become so much older?

  The small woman was studying a photograph, and her shiny hair fell across her pretty little pointy face. “No, it is wonderful, Ivan,” she was saying. She spoke precisely, as if picking her way through the words, with the same accent I had heard at the airport. “It is a portrait of an entire class. A class that votes against its own interests. It is…a photograph of false consciousness.”

  “Well, it’s a damn good print, anyway,” the other woman said. “Lovely work, Ivan.”

  “We’re playing Thematic Apperception Test,” Ivan said, and the dark girl blushed and primly lowered her eyes. “We’ve had responses from Quebec and England. Let’s hear from our U.S. representative.” He handed me the photograph. “What do you see?”

  Two women who, to judge from this view, were middle-aged, overweight, and poor stood gazing into a shop window at a display of tawdry lingerie. High up in the window was a reflection of mounded clouds and trees in full leaf. I did not feel like discussing the picture.

  “Hello,” the small girl said, intercepting my gaze as I looked up. “I am Micheline, and this is my friend Fiona.”

  Fiona reached lazily over to shake hands. “Hello,” I said, allowing our attention to flow away from the photograph. “Do you live here, Fiona, or in England?”

  “Oh, let’s see,” she said. “Where do I live? Well, it’s been quite some time since I’ve even seen England. I’ve been in Montreal for a while, and before that I was in L.A.”

  “Really,” I said. “What were you doing there?”

  “What one does,” she said. “I was working in film.”

  “The industry!” Micheline said. A hectic flush beat momentarily under her white skin, as if she’d been startled by her own exclamation. “There is much money to be made there, but at what personal expense!”

  “Fiona has a gallery here,” Ivan said.

  “No money, no personal expense.” Fiona smiled.

  “It is excellent,” Micheline said. “Fiona exhibits the most important new photographs in Canada. Soon she will have a show of Ivan’s work.”

  “Wonderful
,” I said, but none of the others added anything. “We’re rather on display here, Ivan,” I said. “Are you planning to do something about curtains?”

  Ivan smiled. “No.” Ivan’s rare smile always stopped me cold, and I smiled back as we looked at each other.

  “It is not important,” Micheline said, reclaiming the conversation. “The whole world is a window.”

  “Horseshit,” Fiona said good-naturedly, and yawned.

  “Yes, but that is true, Fiona,” Micheline said. “Privacy is a—what is that?—debased form of dignity. It is dignity’s…atrophied corpse.”

  “How good your English has become,” Fiona said, smiling, but Ivan had nodded approvingly.

  “The rigorous Northern temperament,” Fiona said to me. “Sometimes I long for just a weekend in Los Angeles again.”

  “Not me!” Micheline said. She kicked her feet impatiently.

  “Have you lived there as well?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “But I am sure. Beaches, hotels, drinks with little hats—”

  “That’s Hawaii, I think,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” Micheline said, looking sideways at me out of her doll’s face.

  “So what about it?” Ivan said. “Have you two decided to stay for dinner?”

  “No,” Micheline said, jumping to her feet. “Come, Fiona.” She held out her hand to Fiona, blushing deeply. “We must go.”

  “All right.” Fiona yawned and stood. “But let’s have a rain check, Ivan. Micheline raves about your cooking. Maybe we’ll come back over the weekend for Micheline’s things. Sorry to have left them so long. We’ve been a while sorting things out.”

  “No problem,” Ivan said. “Plenty of closet space.”

  At the door, Micheline was piling on layers and layers of clothing and stamping like a little pony in anticipation of the snow.

  “Tell me about them,” I said to Ivan after dinner, as we lay on the sofa, our feet touching. “Who are they?”

  “What do you mean, ‘who’?” he said. “You met them.”

  “Come on, Ivan,” I said. “All I meant was that I’d like to know more about your friends. How did you meet them? That sort of thing.”

  “Actually,” he said, “I hardly know Fiona. Micheline just brought her over once before.”

  “Micheline’s so extreme,” I said, smiling.

  “She’s very young,” Ivan said.

  “I used to be young,” I said. “But I was never that extreme, was I?”

  “She’s a purist,” Ivan said. “She’s a very serious person.”

  “She seemed a bit of a silly person to me,” I said. “Have she and Fiona been together long?”

  “Just a month or so,” he said.

  “Micheline doesn’t seem as if she’s really used to being with another woman, somehow,” I said. Ivan glanced at a page of newspaper lying on the floor below him. Some headline had caught his eye apparently. “She was sort of defiant,” I said. “Or nervous. As if she were making a statement about being gay.”

  “On the contrary,” Ivan said. “She considers that to be an absolutely fraudulent opposition of categories—gay, straight. Utterly fraudulent.”

  “Do you?” I said.

  “What is this?” Ivan said. “Are you preparing your case against me? Yes, The People of the United States of America versus Ivan Augustine Olmstead. I know.”

  “How long did she live here?” I said.

  “Three months,” he said, and then neither of us said anything or moved for about fifteen minutes.

  “Ivan,” I said. “I didn’t call you. You wanted me to come up here.”

  He looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we’re both very tense.”

  “Of course I’m tense,” I said. “I don’t hear from you for six months, then out of the blue you summon me for some kind of audience, and I don’t know what you’re going to say. I don’t know whether you want some kind of future with me, or whether we’re having our last encounter, or what.”

  “Look,” he said. He sat upright on the sofa. “I don’t know how to say this to you. Because, for some reason, it seems very foreign to you, to your way of thinking. But it’s not out of the blue for me at all, you see. Because you’re always with me. But you seem to want to feel rejected.”

  “I don’t want to feel rejected,” I said. “But if I’ve been rejected I’d just as soon know it.”

  “You haven’t been rejected,” he said. “You can’t be rejected. You’re a part of me. But instead of enjoying what happens between us, you always worry about what has happened between us, or what will happen between us.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Because there is no such thing as an independent present. How can I not worry each time I see you that it will be the last?”

  “You act as if I had all the power between us,” he said. “You have just as much power as I do. But I can’t give it to you. You have to claim it.”

  “If that were true,” I said, “we’d be living together at least half the time.”

  “And if we were living together,” he said, “would you feel that you had to go to work with me or stay with me in the darkroom to see whether my feelings about you changed minute by minute? It’s not the quantity of time we spend together that makes us more close or less close. People are to each other what they are.”

  “But that can change,” I said. “People’s interests are at odds sometimes.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Not fundamentally. And you would understand that if you weren’t so interested in defending your isolating, competitive view of things.”

  “What on earth are you talking about, Ivan? Are you really saying that there’s no conflict between people?”

  “What I’m saying is that it’s absurd for people to be obsessed with their own little roles. People’s situations are just a fraction of their existence—the difference between those situations is superficial, it’s arbitrary. In actuality, we’re all part of one giant human organism, and one part can’t survive at the expense of another part. Would you take off your sock and put it on your hand because you were cold? Look—does the universe care whether it’s you or Louis Pasteur that’s Louis Pasteur? No. From that point of view, we’re all the same.”

  “Well, Ivan,” I said, “if we’re all the same, why drag me up here? Why not just keep Micheline around? Or call in a neighbor?”

  He looked at me, and he sighed. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I just don’t care about you in the way that you need. I just don’t know. I don’t want to falsify my feelings.”

  But when I saw how exhausted he looked, and miserable, loneliness froze my anger, and I was ashamed that I’d allowed myself to become childish. “Never mind,” I said. I wished that he would touch me. “Never mind. We’ll figure it out.”

  It was not until the second week that I regained my balance and Ivan let down his guard, and we were able to talk without hidden purposes and we remembered how it felt to be happy together. Still, it seemed to me as if I were remembering every moment of happiness even as it occurred, and, remembering, mourning its death.

  One day, Ivan was already dressed and sitting in the kitchen by the time I woke up. “Linda called this morning,” he said. “She let the phone ring about a hundred times before I got it. I’m amazed you slept through it.”

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down.

  “I wonder why people do that,” he said. “It’s annoying, and it’s pointless.”

  “It wasn’t pointless in this case,” I said. “You woke up.”

  “Want some toast?” Ivan asked. “Eggs?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. I hardly ever ate breakfast. “So, is she all right?”

  “Fine,” he said. “I guess.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said.

  “Remember that apartment I had in Washington?” he said. “I loved that place. It was the only place I ever lived where I could get the paper delivered.”

  “How’s
Gary?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Ivan said. “According to Linda, he’s got some kind of flu or something. She’s gotten it into her head that it’s psychosomatic, because this is the first time since he was born that I haven’t come home for Christmas.”

  “Home,” I said.

  “Well,” Ivan said. “Gary’s home.”

  “Maybe you should go,” I said.

  “He’ll have to adjust sometime,” Ivan said. “This is just Linda’s way of manipulating the situation.”

  I shrugged. “It’s up to you.” I wondered, really for the first time, what Ivan’s son looked like. “Do you have a picture of Gary?”

  “Somewhere, I think,” Ivan said.

  “I’d like to see one,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “You mean now?”

  “Well, I’d like to,” I said.

  Steam rose from my coffee and faded into the bright room. Outside the window, light snow began to fall. In a few minutes Ivan came back with a wallet-sized snapshot.

  “How did you get into this picture?” I said.

  He took it from me and peered at it. “Oh. Some friends of Linda’s were over that day. They took it.”

  “So that’s Linda,” I said. For nine years I’d been imagining the wrong woman—someone tired and aggrieved—but the woman in the photograph was finely chiseled, like Ivan. Even in her jeans she appeared aristocratic, and her expression was somewhat set, as if she had just disposed of some slight inconvenience. She and Ivan could have been brother and sister. The little boy between them, however, looked clumsy and bereft. His head was large and round and wobbly-looking, and the camera had caught him turning, his mouth open in alarm, as if he had fallen through space into the photograph. A current of fury flowed through me, leaving me as depleted as the child in the picture looked. “What if he is sick?” I said.

  “Kids get sick all the time,” Ivan said.

  “You could fly down Christmas Eve and come back the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh.”

  “Flying on Christmas Eve’s impossible anyhow,” he said.

  “Well, you could go down tomorrow.”