The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “Now look,” Lewis said a few minutes later as they pulled off the highway onto a dirt road. “What do you see?”

  “I give up,” Caitlin said.

  “That’s right,” Lewis said. “Nothing. You can zip up and down all day long and never know these villages are here.”

  And as he spoke, in fact, a little village was unfolding like paper flowers in a glass of water. First there was only the dusty road, and then there were oxen, with flowing horns and long Egyptian faces, and ribs that stood out, stretching their hides, yoked to a cart with great wooden wheels. A small boy sat astride one of the oxen, his ribs protruding, too, above his swollen belly. He sat and stared as the jeep passed, though Caitlin waved, and then the road was lined with painted walls, velvety in the sun, with openings that led into what must have been tiny homes or shops.

  Lewis parked where the road stopped and the walls opened out onto a little village square waving with lilies, in the center of which sat a few wooden benches in the shade of an enormous tree, whose bluish bole shot up and up to a dense and massive dome of leaves floating, very green, against the deep, even sky. Tiny birds darted and chattered. In the heat, little yellow butterflies danced above the high grass, making the air around them flicker, but a chilly darkness was pouring down stone steps out of a church that faced the square. Doves, resting among the cracked angels on its immense wooden doors, ruffled up as Caitlin and Lewis passed through.

  Phantom colors dropped from the high windows. A barefoot woman knelt, her hair streaming down her back, and far away, in the shaft of light that pierced the altar, Christ hung bleeding and serene in his perpetual agony. “Let’s go,” Caitlin whispered. “I want to go.”

  The heat was intense, but it didn’t seem to bother Lewis. He guided Caitlin out behind the church to a lane where, inside tiny painted rooms, she could see some rough pieces of furniture, or a case or two of soft drinks and shelves that held a few cans or sacks of food. On one dirt floor huge and glossy avocados lay mounded like a heap of slumbering animals, and through another doorway Caitlin saw a circle of old men in coarse clothing playing oddly shaped stringed instruments. They sang in a fragile harmony, and a pale marine light came from their dark eyes as they listened intently to the notes their fingers released, their faces skeletal and papery. People disappeared inside as Caitlin and Lewis passed, and children hung back.

  The lane branched off into mud paths. A stream glittered; beyond it low dwellings were nearly hidden by blossoms and vines that festooned them like hair ribbons. Caitlin looked around and saw no one. “Let’s go,” she said. “These people are strange.”

  “They’re just paranoid,” Lewis said. “Probably think we’re looking for Communists.”

  “Why would they think that?” Caitlin restrained a childish giggle of apprehension.

  “Why not?” Lewis said. “It’s a good place, come to think of it. Look at these people—they’re starving. Didn’t you see their faces?”

  As Caitlin looked again, a child burst from the wide silence and flashed across a field, all brown legs and bright tatters. Tiny points of fear sparkled across Caitlin’s skin—she turned and ran herself.

  Lewis caught up with her easily at the church. “Hey,” he said, holding her by the wrist, “take it easy. I want to take your picture.”

  “Come on,” Caitlin said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I said I want to take your picture,” Lewis said. “What’s the matter with you?” He turned her wrist until she fell back onto the stone steps. “Smile,” he said, lifting a little camera she hadn’t noticed him carrying.

  She stood up, staring at Lewis in fury, and teetered for a second.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I get all excited to have English-speaking company.

  “Look,” he said, opening the car door for her. “Not bad, huh?” He handed Caitlin a little snapshot, newly extruded from his camera, in which she sat, an awkward smudge on stone steps, one hand grasping the other wrist.

  She grasped her wrist as the road buckled and writhed beneath the jeep. She looked terrified in the picture, she looked ill. These people were starving—she wanted to talk to Holly. Could Holly have meant those awful things she’d said at breakfast? Where was Holly? Caitlin had come to see her. She wanted to see Holly. “I feel terrible,” she told her.

  “I didn’t really hurt you”—but it was Lewis, answering lightly—“did I, sweetheart?”

  “Lewis—” The heat was phenomenal; Caitlin wanted to reach under Lewis’s shirt and dry her forehead on his soft, rosy T-shirt, but it was covered with dark, wet patches. “I don’t feel good.”

  “You don’t feel good?” Lewis glanced at her. “Listen, you didn’t eat anything funny today, did you?”

  “I didn’t eat anything today,” Caitlin said. “Just a bite of those shitty eggs at breakfast. And a piece of candy on the street.”

  “On the street?” Lewis said. “You ate something on the street?” And then Caitlin was sick all over his car.

  “What, are you ignorant?” Lewis said later as he put her to bed in her hotel room. “You should never eat stuff on the street.” The toilet, still flushing violently, crashed and thundered behind his voice. “Anyhow”—he poured a glass of water from a jug on the bureau—“take two of these little jobbies, and you’ll be fine in a couple of hours.”

  “Lewis,” she said. “Lewis…”

  “I’ll be checking on you later,” he said from the doorway. “And I plan to see you as good as new. Now, you want me to send someone up about the toilet? ’Cause that thing is fucking barbaric.”

  Caitlin’s eyes felt grainy and far too large. The room was grainy. It broke up into sizzling whorls of black and white dots; zigzags were breaking from her head. The sound of running water was supposed to be refreshing! Boyce said they didn’t have water; so why didn’t they take some of hers, whoever they were? Flowers and butterflies throbbed through the torrent—eyes glittered behind them. In the stone plaza, ragged throngs clamored for magic soap, its secret existence undetected by the imperial magnates who swarmed through the Miami airport, dangerously close. They weren’t true, those things that Holly had said at breakfast, and the proof was that she was here. Why had she come, if not to see Holly, if not to see what had happened to all that time she’d had! And Holly was too harsh; things could be undone, with a little imagination—repositioned, seen in a different light. Except—except that she was so sick; because if she were sick and dying, then everything that had ever happened would stay forever, just the way it was right now.

  Beyond the screen of Caitlin’s illness Holly was sitting, dipped in some phosphorescent substance, happy, light. Caitlin struggled and thrashed, trying to call out to Holly, but it was Lewis once again who answered her. “Ready to get up?” he said.

  “Did Holly leave?” Caitlin said.

  “Holly?” Lewis said. “You’ve been asleep for hours.”

  “I have to talk to Holly,” Caitlin said.

  “They’re not back yet,” Lewis said. How had he gotten into her room again? He must have taken her key. “How about something to eat? We’ll go down to the strip—check out le tout Tegoose.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Caitlin said. “When is Holly going to be back? I want to wait for her.”

  “Forget it,” Lewis said. “They won’t be back. Not tonight. It’s almost midnight now, and no one does these roads after dark. Anyhow, you should get out of here for a bit; get some air.”

  It was true. Caitlin felt weak and strange. The toilet still thundered, and this room that Holly had put her in was hot and sour and stinking.

  In the floating pools of darkness by the elevator, two men in uniform lounged. “Relax, princess.” Lewis guided her into the elevator, and the door shut her into safety. “Those guys weren’t waiting for you.” But they’d been carrying what must have been automatic rifles. Just like that man, Caitlin realized, she’d seen earlier in the garden near Harvey’s hotel, though she hadn’t taken it in at
the time. Now he, and others she’d hardly noticed, began to march toward her, in their various uniforms, through her memory. They’d been by the side of the road, in shadow, now that she thought of it, yes they had, and in town, perched high above the thronging people, watching. On the way out Caitlin and Lewis passed by the restaurant, where waiters who looked like champions now circulated instead of the waitresses, sleek and unsmiling.

  The streets were so steep and curving that now, in the dark, the little lights—the lights of street lamps and houses—appeared to be strung all up and down the air. “Yeah, it’s pretty at night,” Lewis said. “And pretty in the day when the sun’s out—brightens it up like a little smile. Funny place to use as a control panel, though, isn’t it? Wouldn’t think to look at it that it’s one of the premier cities in the U.S. Just like Chicago—except for this thing of location, I mean.”

  Lewis opened the door with a flourish onto his apartment—a single room one flight above a small, shuttered store. There was hardly any furniture—just a bed, a television, and a night table next to the bed which held a lamp, a carved box, an ashtray, and a fishbowl containing a little goldfish and an ugly ceramic castle. One of the walls, though, was layered like a child’s bulletin board with clippings and photographs and insignia, including a Confederate flag and an Iron Cross. “Little TV?” Lewis said. He lifted his shirt to unstrap a holster and pistol, which he put down on the night table, and reached over to switch on the set.

  It grew bright, and tiny men drifted across it in parachutes. Groups of them bloomed and bloomed, darkening the screen again, and then the scene was gone, replaced by the street where Caitlin had been walking earlier in the day. She saw the stone plaza in the background, and streaming by in the foreground children in school uniforms and crowds of men and women with their soft, defeated expressions. “But in downtown Tegucigalpa today,” an announcer intoned sonorously, “it was business as usual for—”

  “Enough?” Lewis said. He turned off the volume and sat down on the bed.

  “Lewis—” Caitlin said. True, they hadn’t been waiting for her, those guys by the elevator. But they had been waiting for someone. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Here, you pick.” He handed her the carved box, which was filled with thick joints. “All export quality.”

  As she bent over him to accept a light, her glance fell on a snapshot pinned up among the things on the wall behind him. Although the figure in the snapshot seemed to be a man, the body was so mutilated that Caitlin could not be sure. Patches were torn from it, and the arms and legs were twisted, but the young face was shockingly intact.

  “That was a union guy,” Lewis said. “He stirred up a lot of big trouble in a lot of little towns. Hey, why the long look? Don’t you understand what’s going on? Don’t you know what kind of world those people want us to live in?”

  Caitlin handed him the joint and watched his eyes narrow with pleasure as he inhaled. They smoked for a while quietly, passing the joint back and forth, and Caitlin thought of her hotel room—the little room that had harbored her in her sickness. “Lewis—” she said.

  “This is that guy’s chain, in fact,” he said, pulling at the neck of his T-shirt to reveal a silver chain. “You know, I never talked about this to anyone before, but I have this fantasy that the guy’s got a wife somewhere—a widow. Very beautiful, very innocent, and she has this matching chain. And someday I’m going to see this beautiful Honduran girl somewhere with a bunch of little kids, wearing that chain, and wham—just like that I’ll be married, have a family life of my own.”

  “What does Brandon do for a living?” she said.

  “That what’s been on your mind?” he said. “That what’s been bothering you?”

  She shrugged, watching him.

  “Good,” he said. “’Cause I was afraid you were getting bored with me.”

  “No,” she said. Out the window the little lights burned merrily.

  “Good,” he said. “I’m glad to hear it. Well, you can relax. Brandon’s strictly in transport. Well-regulated, high-paying, protected work. Mostly doesn’t even know what his cargo is. Kids these days, very sensible—no romance in them at all. Butch—hey, Butch,” he said, tapping the fishbowl. “Come say hello to my new friend. Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t my new friend Caitlin pretty? Ach,” he said, turning away from the circling fish, “fuck you. To tell you the truth, Butch isn’t particularly gregarious. You know, some people say that a fish is not a good pet because it’s not an affectionate companion. But I say, hey—who are you to evaluate the affection of a fish? You look in the bowl, and you see what you see. Furthermore, that is one ridiculous way to approach the question of a pet. Because, for instance, what is a pet? A pet is another little consciousness to balance out the fact of your own, which can otherwise sometimes feel like—how can I put this?—like the whole bowl. So there a fish qualifies, right off the bat. Then you have to think, well, what are the specific features of a fish? And they are (a) a fish floats, which is a good quality in and of itself; (b) a fish does not have to be walked, which the same; and (c) a fish has a very wise, eternal type of nature. Whew.” He took the little camera from his back pocket and stretched out on the bed with an arm over his eyes. “No high like a reefer high.”

  “No,” Caitlin said. She accepted a fresh joint from him and sat down in the corner, leaning against the wall.

  “Of course,” Lewis said, “each fish as an individual is not eternal, which is the down side of fish. To give you an example: I was recently living in the Philippines. Got myself all set up with a fancy tank and a fish to match—a particularly beautiful and pleasing specimen, a sort of blue-and-yellow-banded disk with a flirty tail. Well, that fish swam up and down, around and around its little castle there, thinking its own private thoughts from one end of the day to the other. You could watch that thing for weeks on end and never move—no matter what you’d seen during the day, no matter what, that fish would put it all in perspective. It was a very beautiful being. But one evening I was having a little drink with some buddies, and one thing led to another and so on and so forth, and, what with this and that, by the time I got home, which was not for a couple of days, as it happened, when I walked in the door, there was that fish, lying on the surface, belly up.”

  “Maybe you should feed this one now,” Caitlin said. The fish looked agitated; it was darting back and forth, bumping against the glass. “I think it’s hungry.” Or maybe it was suffocating—the bowl was filthy, with trailing bits of pale debris floating around in it.

  For a moment Lewis seemed not to have heard, but then he lifted the ashtray from the night table and flung it against the wall. “Fucking fish,” Caitlin heard him say through the noise of the impact, which was reverberating around and around her like a lasso about to snap tight.

  Ten steps to the door, not more than ten. But the door itself was on the other side of the bed. Lewis lay back down, looking at Caitlin past the fish. “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing down there on the floor?”

  Those boys from the plane had looked so easily damaged, with their shorn heads, and dangerous, like a litter of newborn animals, squirming blindly, and clumsily exposing their tiny teeth and claws. “Do you have your orders?” the official at the airport had asked them softly, and they had nodded, pale and helpless.

  “Come here,” Lewis said. He reached over and unscrewed the bulb in the night-table lamp. The room flickered nervously in the greenish light from the TV, and the mounds of Lewis’s reclining shape—his big legs, his broad torso and shoulders, the hair curling up from his forehead—looked to Caitlin like a landscape; perhaps little figures in parachutes were already beginning to choke the air beyond it, spreading out like spores all over the villages in the distance, the breathing hills and living valleys.

  The day Caitlin had left, really left, Todd (by which time she was no longer welcome to stay) the sky had been as silken and pure as a banner. Holly had not cried at all that morning
, or even seemed to understand.

  When the taxi arrived to take her to the airport, though, Caitlin had cried. She’d knelt down beside Holly, holding Holly’s little face in her hands, but Holly had hardly seemed to see her. “Can I go play with Patricia today, Daddy?” Holly had said, turning away as though Caitlin were invisible, as though Caitlin had simply ceased to exist. “Can I go play with Patricia?”

  “Hey,” Lewis said.

  Caitlin started. She saw the fish darting and circling in the flickering light, bumping against the glass as though at any moment its cloudy little bowl could be a great fresh pond, strewn with leaves and flowers.

  “Look,” Lewis said, “I thought I told you to come here.”

  The Robbery

  From the bed where she lay with her feet propped up on a pillow, Jill could see out into her garden, now in its most lavish aspect, and beyond, over the hedge to the Binghams’ lawn, on which their white house floated. It looked as pristine and enigmatic as a freshly ironed dress, but only two days before, someone had forced the lock on the door while the Binghams were out, and had raged through, appropriating some of their possessions and leaving others in ruins.

  “We should have invited them tonight,” Jill said.

  “The Binghams?” Nicholas said. “We never invite the Binghams.”

  Nicholas, just out of the shower, was wrapped in the most beautiful, soft robe. As he walked by the window the last shining strokes of sunlight fractured around him as though he were an emissary from some wholly harmonious universe, and Jill was newly abashed by his perfection. But right behind him, across the lawn, the Binghams, previously so hale and confident, were falling at this very moment—turning and turning in bottomless space. Jill steadied herself, rubbing her cheek against Nick’s robe as he sat down next to her. “It’s just that I dropped over to see them after work today. They seemed so shaken. Really, we should make a gesture…”