The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “Hello, Marcia,” she said stonily. Patty was not sure why she had called, but she knew, with a weariness that must accompany the end of a lengthy and sordid police investigation, that it was necessary. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” Marcia said. “I’m feeling very good about myself.”

  “Splendid,” Patty said.

  “Good Lord, you sound awful,” Marcia said brightly, and instantly sobered. “There isn’t some problem about the apartment, is there?”

  “Marcia,” Patty said, becoming fully aware of her own suspicions as she voiced them, “you promised me to Stuart.”

  “I did not!” Marcia said. “Heavens, Patty, what can you mean?”

  “He never even knew, the poor sucker, did he! For six months you plotted to palm him off on me, and he never even knew.”

  “Calm down, Patty.” Hah! At least Marcia sounded alarmed—undoubtedly she’d expected Patty to remain a credulous, pitiful schoolgirl forever. “I’m serious, Patty. You’d better learn how to deal with your feelings before you do something really self-destructive.”

  “And furthermore, Marcia”—the room swarmed with visions of pores, ducts, glands, nodes, hairs, and membranes—“he’s disgusting!”

  “He’s only as disgusting as you are to yourself,” Marcia said serenely. “Honestly, Patty—I simply thought you two would enjoy one another.”

  Even in the airshaft the weather was dismal, and Patty sat and watched a cruel sleet slide down the windowpane, until Stuart showed up, a few hours later, looking as if he’d been fished up from the Styx. Patty opened the door without a word, and without a word Stuart came in. He parked himself in front of the cold stove, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the filthy puddles forming around him.

  Patty experienced a wrenching meld of triumph and defeat. If it had crossed Stuart’s mind (and it certainly must have) to seek refuge with Marcia in Austin, he, too, would have had to face the grim truth that Patty had been lured to this apartment so that Marcia could (and with a clear conscience!) leave him behind. Well, Patty thought, she had been set up, but in point of dreadful fact she was fiercely glad to see Stuart.

  Later, as they lay in their separate beds, Patty spoke gruffly into the dark. “Are you all right now, Stuart?”

  He hesitated, but misery conquered pride. “I’m cold.”

  He snuffled, and when Patty climbed in with him and he turned his back to cuddle his bony shoulders against her, he was indeed shivering. “Want to read to me, Stuart?” she said.

  “O.K.,” he said, gladdening instantly and switching on his light. “Let’s see. O.K., this is Tristes Tropiques. And right here Lévi-Strauss is propounding his interpretation of the face and body paintings of the Caduveo, some of the last living Brazilian Mbaya-Guaicuru:

  “But the remedy they failed to use on the social level, or which they refused to consider, could not elude them completely; it continued to haunt them in an insidious way. And since they could not become conscious of it and live it out in reality, they began to dream about it. Not in a direct form, which would have clashed with their prejudices, but in a transposed, and seemingly innocuous, form: in their art. If my analysis is correct, in the last resort the graphic art of the Caduveo women is to be interpreted, and its mysterious appeal and seemingly gratuitous complexity to be explained, as the phantasm of a society ardently and insatiably seeking a means of expressing symbolically the institutions it might have, if its interests and superstitions did not stand in the way. In this charming civilization, the female beauties trace the outlines of the collective dream with their makeup: their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age, which they extol in their ornamentation, since they have no code in which to express it, and whose mysteries they disclose as they reveal their nudity.”

  How happy Stuart seemed, Patty thought despairingly, to be back from his banishment, to have the little glow of his reading lamp around him. How happy he was with this damned book—his constant companion these days.

  By the time Patty woke, Stuart was out and about, but the depression beside her in the bed was still warm. She thought of her own cold bed in the next room, and without taking the time to change or make coffee she climbed up to the third floor and knocked on Mrs. Jorgenson’s door. People had pushed her around, she thought—people had taken advantage of her. “Mrs. Jorgenson,” she called. The peephole underwent a telling alteration as Patty stared into it, but all she could hear was a peculiar sibilance, as of Dobermans running lightly through crumpled newspaper. “Mrs. Jorgenson—listen, Mrs. Jorgenson. This is Patty, from downstairs. It’s winter, and I’m cold. You have enough blankets now, Mrs. Jorgenson, and I want mine back.” She put her ear to the door, but there was only that continuous rustling sound. “That’s my good Hudson Bay blanket,” she called into the doorframe, “that my parents gave me when I was little to take to camp. It’s mine, Mrs. Jorgenson, and I want it!”

  “Whore!” Mrs. Jorgenson yelled from inside. “Prostitute!”

  In December, Arnold acquired his liquor license, and business increased radically. By that time, practice had eroded Patty’s gross incompetence, but no one would have been equipped for the onslaught of customers that poured through the doors all night long. Soon it became necessary for Arnold to hire reinforcements, and with other waitresses working on her shift Patty’s job, now lucrative, became more or less bearable as well.

  Most of the cooks, bartenders, and waitresses with whom Patty worked took the grueling terrors of restaurant life in good part. Together they would fear, face, endure, and fear afresh the Sisyphean ordeal of customers in exchange for the flexible schedule that allowed them to continue their dancing classes, their short runs Off Broadway, their studies of Indo-European, or the pursuit of voluptuous amusements.

  Patty, who had intended to strike no such bargains with life, became increasingly impatient with the easygoing attitude of her co-workers, but there was one waitress, Donna, by whom Patty was deeply impressed. Donna was a tall, good-looking woman around Patty’s age, who during the week supervised a direct-mail campaign for a knitwear empire and on the weekends moonlighted as a waitress. “But not for long,” she told Patty. “And you’ll get out of here soon, too.”

  “I hope so,” Patty said. “But look at Buddy and Menlo and Sheila—they’ve been here almost as long as I have.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Patty,” Donna said. “Those guys are lifers.”

  Lifers. Yes, Patty thought, compared to Donna the rest of them were children, playing. And perhaps in twenty or thirty years they would still be clustered near the waitress stand, and she with them—wrinkled children, playing.

  The customers, in contrast, seemed veritable incarnations of passing time. Someone would come in every night for a month and then disappear altogether. Romances would blossom and die, people and their involvements would develop in unpredictable directions.

  “Isn’t that the truth, Sugar?” said Ginger, a customer to whom Patty commented one evening on this phenomenon. Ginger was the gorgeous but moody prima of a troupe of huge male dancers engaged for a long run at a nearby theatre. They danced as women, and they came in often after work, sometimes in dashing rehearsal sweats, but more frequently in full flamboyant costume and makeup. Tonight, the yellow gossamer wings attached to Ginger’s gown set off his pearly black skin and imperious, fantastical beauty. “Yes, things sure do move along in Manhattan. You drop by your favorite boîte one time, and you say, ‘Where’s Hank?’ And they say, ‘Hank?’ And you say, ‘Hank, you know, sweetheart, the guy who sits here every night?’ And they just shrug, like they never heard of him. I go home and see my momma, Sugar, she’s still chasin’ the same chicken around the yard.” Ginger allowed his slanting lids to dip for an instant in dismissal.

  Almost the only one of the pioneer customers who still appeared with frequency was George. “Tell me, Patty,” he said one night, “what famous monarch…gave forth a fatal dazzle?”

  “I really don
’t know, George,” Patty said testily. “I’ll think about that while I wait on some of these other people.”

  Everything was going wrong that night. Toast was too dark, drinks were too light, customers temporized over the tiny menu while the second hand sped, but if Patty told them “Let me give you a moment,” they would grab her wrist. “Don’t move!” they’d say. “I know what I want. Um, Lois, you go first.” Arnold cowered in the basement abusing substances and gloating over the books, even though the kitchen was running out of soup and potato skins and ribs. And it was near Christmas, so nobody was tipping and everyone was upset, and it was a long time before Patty got back to George. “I give up, George,” she said.

  “Spoilsport,” he teased. “Just guess.”

  “I don’t know, George. Oh, all right—Marie Antoinette.”

  “Marie Antoinette?” George looked stunned. “Marie Antoinette was a famous monarch, Patty, but she did not give forth a fatal dazzle. The famous monarch who did give forth a fatal dazzle was Louis Quatorze, the Sun King.”

  “What about the affair of the diamond necklace?” Patty demanded. This was not how she had imagined her adulthood. “What about that?”

  George balanced his chin on a finger and thought. “Well,” he said, “I suppose that counts. But do you know, Patty”—he improvised a rueful smile, and his tone was light, although vitality was draining rapidly from his face and voice—“I don’t think you care about Louis Quatorze. I think you only care about female monarchs.”

  “Actually…” Patty said. All around her, people were demanding food, drink, clean spoons, napkins, the fulfillment of infantile fantasies, sweets, smiles, anything they could get away with. “Actually, I don’t really care about any monarchs, to tell you the truth.”

  But when things calmed down, Patty returned to George’s table penitent. “How’re you doing here, George?” she asked.

  “Fine, Patty,” he said with awful self-possession. “Please tell Buddy it was delicious. Patty, do you know what George III’s mother said to him?”

  “No, George,” she said. “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘George, be a king.’” George gazed out over Patty’s head at a distant empire. “‘George, be a king.’…”

  And when Patty returned to George’s table later, she found only more change than he could afford, she knew, and on his plate a pile of little bones that suggested he’d curled up there and died.

  One night at work Donna announced to Patty that she was quitting. “I’ve met this man, Fletcher. Some corporation has hired him to develop a magazine about the media, and I explained to him that he should put me in charge of circulation.”

  “That’s great, Donna.” Patty sighed.

  “And it’s just about time for you to start leading a real person’s life yourself. Listen, Patty, keep in touch. You never know—something just might turn up at the magazine.”

  At least Patty had the opportunity, while she languished at the restaurant, to scrutinize the apparently inexhaustible parade of customers for information that would lead to her missing drafting table, her brownstone, her escort. It may seem that because there is not much room for certain kinds of elaboration in the act of ordering something at a restaurant little is expressed by it. But in fact the very restriction of the situation is the precondition of deep grooves through which individual personalities are extruded with great force. “You do that?” is what your waiter or waitress or bartender is thinking as you place your order. “You’re like that?” And although you may assume that you are behaving pretty much as everyone before you has behaved in a similar situation, that is a serious misconception, one not shared by those who stand and face you.

  Patty had no leisure for the random yield of disinterested science, but as the months slid by she was able, through diligent observation, to harvest a crop of utilitarian specifics from the people who paused in front of her, in unwitting demonstration of the selves they had tended and grown in the extreme climates of the city. In spite of Stuart’s alarmist denunciations, Patty persevered in maneuvering her appearance from undistinguished wholesomeness to the assertively stylish, with only several errors, such as the silk-wrapped nails, acquired at great expense, that felt like lobster claws extending from her fingers as they clicked against her tray.

  Still, Patty was forced to note, while many of the customers were graced with beauty or wit or marvelous clothing, few seemed to have achieved a far-reaching or reliable measure of the success that she had assumed New York offered for the asking. Luck must be in scant supply these days. On the other hand, perhaps people came to this restaurant during some sort of interim stage, or limbo; certainly Patty never knew how people fared before they started coming to the restaurant or how they fared after they stopped. People seemed simply to appear and then to vanish. She hadn’t seen George, for instance, since the night of the unpleasantness. Life had moved on for him. Or, as she once shamefacedly reflected, she had forced it to move on.

  And then, at the beginning of summer, Ginger told Patty that he and his company were going to California. “I just hate to leave, Sugar. But, Lord—the overhead these days! It’s just too steep for an artist. Here, don’t you look so sad now. Take a load off your feet for a minute.”

  It was a slow night, and Patty let Ginger lift her onto his lap, where she nestled contemplatively against his papier-mâché breasts and admired the steely sheen of his arm, folded so gently around her. His arm was as smooth and hard as steel, too, as Patty’s finger, trailing idly along it, discovered, but its surface was as welcoming as satin. And this surface—which seemed more lovely to Patty than skin, less perishable, just as precious—raised on her own a velvety nap as she shifted, straining for some position of perfect rest.

  “Oh, look,” Ginger said, while Patty let the back of her hand enjoy the delicious indentation from which the curve of Ginger’s shoulder flared. “Look how sweet! Look at those tiny pink nails, that little milky face. And freckles.” Patty closed her eyes to better appreciate Ginger playfully favoring one freckle, then another. “Long, long lashes.” Ginger brushed his cheek against Patty’s lashes, and when she opened her eyes again the eyes that gleamed back were feral and slanting. “Little flower mouth,” he said, and Patty’s mouth opened, too, as he arched, letting her glide it from his jeweled earlobe down his polished neck and along the sweep of his collarbone, but there was a quick explosion in her brain as “Waitress! Waitress!” someone called, and Patty scrambled trembling to her feet, scraping her shoulder against papier-mâché.

  Patty had developed the habit of routinely clambering in with Stuart when she got home, for warmth and company, but that morning she prowled back and forth across the apartment. Stuart didn’t wake up, so eventually Patty poured herself a glass of cranberry juice and drew up a chair across from his bed, where he lay in a little humid wad, wheezing, appearing to become more and more exhausted as he slept, like a shipwreck victim unconscious on a seaborne plank. How painful a sight it was! How painful it was to be reminded that Stuart’s helplessness was something beyond a manipulative ruse! Patty and Stuart had laid to rest the question of sex (sex between the two of them, that is), and although Stuart raised it from time to time, he did so clearly in the spirit of commemorative iteration. It almost made Patty sad that he had come to be as uninterested, actually, in the prospect as she was herself. She sipped at her cranberry juice, watching him, thinking.

  Her presence must have made itself felt, because Stuart wheezed mightily, thrashed, and flung himself into a sitting position. “Patty,” he said.

  “Stuart,” she said, “what famous monarch gave forth a fatal dazzle?”

  “Come here and give me a hug, Patty-Cake,” he said. He moved over to make room and politely turned his back to her.

  “Come on,” she said. “Please guess what famous monarch gave forth a fatal dazzle.”

  “Well…” He sighed. “O.K. Jupiter, then.”

  “Jupiter,” she said. “That’s a stupi
d guess. Jupiter isn’t even a monarch.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Stuart cleared his throat. “Well, listen to this, Miss Smarty:

  “Oh, thou art fairer than the evening’s air,

  Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

  Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter.

  When he appeared to hapless Semele:

  More lovely than the monarch of the sky.

  In wanton Arethusa’s azure arms,

  And none but thou shalt be my paramour.”

  When Stuart stopped, a spectral resonance hung in the room as if a cello had been playing.

  “So?” Patty demanded, forcing back tears.

  “So Jupiter’s the monarch of the sky,” Stuart said. “Get it? And he also fries Semele, which, in my opinion, is, like, an irrefutably fatal dazzle. Anyhow, what do you care?”

  “It’s just a game,” Patty said miserably. “What Famous Monarch.”

  “Oh,” Stuart said. “Trivial Pursuit for right-wing extremists. Anyhow, all monarchs give forth a fatal dazzle. Fatal dazzle is the sort of sine qua non of monarchy. The steady effulgence of enlightened self-government, for example—”

  “Stuart,” Patty interrupted, “I don’t want to talk about this.” Morning had arrived in the airshaft; a thousand stars had dimmed. Mr. Nice Guy and his wife would be waking just above Marcia’s ceiling, and, above theirs, Mrs. Jorgenson. “I’m tired, Stuart. I’m lonely. I want a real boyfriend.”

  “Well, Patty,” Stuart said softly. She could feel his laborious breathing behind the fragile arc of his rib cage. “I just can’t help you there.”

  Customers generated themselves from air; where there had been one, now there were twenty. Patty rushed back and forth in terror, first for menus, then, thinking better of it, for knives and forks.

  “Don’t fret, Sugar,” said a man, putting a calming arm around her. From the prodigality and exquisite subtlety of the painted designs that covered his body, Patty realized that this man was a chief.