The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “Well, now,” Lyle said. “Let’s not—”

  “Look at the Jews,” Kitsy said. “Look at the Asians—they’ve suffered, they’ve been persecuted, they’ve been slaughtered. But their children play the violin. They get into Harvard. They carry out the garbage. Other immigrant groups—”

  “Just one small point,” Owen said, “is, immigrants are people who decide to go somewhere. People who pack a suitcase, buy a ticket—”

  “Oh, I know it sounds ridiculous when I put it like that,” Kitsy said.

  “It certainly does, Kitsy,” Bud said. “Amanda—”

  “I know how it sounds, thank you, Bud,” Kitsy said furiously, but as she turned to Owen, Jill saw, her expression was shockingly piteous. “And that’s what I used to think, too. You know, that they’d been slaves and so on, so they couldn’t be expected et cetera, et cetera—”

  “But that’s not even my—” Owen said.

  “And, Owen, darling”—Kitsy sprang toward him, gesticulating with her glass—“the terrible thing is that you’re so good and kind yourself that you don’t see the terrible things that happen to people, the terrible things that people do to one another—” As she leaned against him, tears spilled from her closed eyes.

  “There, there,” Owen said, but his arms hung at his sides.

  “I’m sorry that you’re unhappy, Kitsy,” Amanda said. “I’m sorry if I’ve said anything or done anything to cause you unhappiness. But I’m afraid I have to clear the record, because the fact is that it was not Dwayne who robbed the Binghams.”

  “I’d be the last to doubt your word, sweetheart,” Bud said. He was breathing shallowly, Jill saw, just as she was, herself. “But just how are we to believe you?”

  “Yes,” Jill said, or didn’t say. She saw Amanda’s fluctuating color, her shining gold bracelets, as though through a fever. “How?”

  “Since you must know,” Amanda said. “Since it’s been decided that it’s absolutely everybody’s business, the fact is, I checked. At Dwayne’s program. Dwayne was there—in St. Louis. He was at a meeting that night—”

  Jill’s hand tingled, and for a moment all she heard was a breeze outside, riffling the leaves, but then there was an uproar. Kitsy was speaking loudly, and Owen turned away toward the garden. Lyle pounded on the piano, Susan, for some reason, was crying, and Bud and Nick were laughing. Nick whooped with laughter. “Amanda,” he said, flinging his arms around Amanda while she stood, furiously still, “you’re perfect, do you hear me? Perfect,” he was saying, as the room waved around Jill, gelatinous with Nick’s laughter. But Bud had stopped laughing, Jill saw. He was staring at Nick and Amanda, and it was only Nick who was laughing.

  No, Susan was laughing, too, Jill realized. Susan was not crying—she was laughing. She was splayed out over her chair, laughing without pleasure or comprehension. “What’s going on?” she managed to say, through fresh inundations of laughter. “Why is everybody laughing?”

  “Well, that really was the worst, wasn’t it,” Nick said later, with satisfaction. There had been kisses, and tears, and poorly balanced hugs, and everyone had gotten out the door, though whether anybody had gotten home or not, Jill didn’t care. She turned away as Nick unbuttoned his shirt—she had already changed in the dressing room.

  “Tomorrow will be spectacular,” Nick said. “Everyone on the phone all day apologizing. If anyone even remembers what happened—”

  Jill waited until the words came of their own accord. “What did happen?”

  “Nothing.” He laughed. “You sound like Susan. Nothing happened. Just one of those tectonic upheavals between old friends.”

  “Nothing matters,” she said. “Does it, Nick?”

  “Well, this doesn’t matter,” he said. Her stare seemed simply not to reach him. She turned to the mirror and slowly combed her hair.

  “You know—” He climbed into bed. “We’re not going to need this blanket tonight. The thing is, though, I really do feel sorry for Owen. Not a day goes by that Kitsy doesn’t make a spectacle of herself in one way or another.”

  “You mean that she deserves to be humiliated because she’s not attractive. You think that only women like Amanda ought to be able to have affairs.”

  “Darling—” Nick turned to her and held out his hand. “What’s the matter? You’re not feeling well, are you.”

  “The truth is,” Jill said, “that Kitsy’s in a miserable position.”

  “She’s damned fortunate,” Nick said. “Owen puts up with her completely.”

  “Yes,” Jill said. “It’s like a sentence of penal servitude.”

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Jill.” Nick dropped his hand. “At any rate, it’s over.”

  “Besides,” Jill said. “You should have seen him with Katrina tonight. It was disgusting.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Nick sighed. “Well, I suppose we’re going to have to be more careful of you from now on.”

  In the mirror, Jill watched him close his eyes and turn.

  “Would you get the lights?” he said. “Or do you want to read?”

  “No.” She switched off the lights. “Go to sleep.”

  She sat down in the chair with her feet up and her arms around her knees, watching as the night settled into the room. She saw Nick’s eyes gleam for a moment in the darkness. “Look at the moon,” he said, his voice thickening with sleep. “What a moon…”

  “Nick—” Jill said.

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “When the baby comes, I want to stop working.”

  “Stop working? I thought you liked your job, Jill.”

  “It’s only a part-time job, honey. We spend more on help than I make.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I can afford it. If you want to work, you should work.”

  “But it isn’t really for anything, Nick. It’s just an office job. It isn’t really very interesting. I’m not particularly good at it, I don’t do anybody any good—”

  “Do you want to be one of those women who just sit around the house all day?”

  “Why are we married if you’re so disappointed in me?” Jill said. “Did you marry me just so you could be disappointed in me?”

  “This is ridiculous,” Nick said. “You’re exhausted. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to work, that’s fine, and if you want to stay home, that’s fine, too. But I don’t want to discuss this any more tonight. I’m going to sleep, and I think you should, too.”

  “I want to stay home,” Jill said. “I want to take care of my home and my children. I don’t want all these strangers in my house anymore.”

  But Nick lay still. He looked like marble, the sheet looked like carved marble in the pearly indigo of the room. “Nick—” Jill said. His lashes fluttered, his eyes gleamed again for an instant. He spoke indistinctly and turned.

  Jill settled back in her chair, her face tilted toward the window. Cool waves of darkness slid in from outside; there was a brief, plangent rush of leaves. Below, in the garden, flowers were tossing about, sighing and giving off their tender light from generous blossoms, thick, pale stems. The grass was wet and tangled, and through it a little path led out from the far corner of the yard, past the swings, and out behind the Binghams’ house. It went along behind all the houses on the block—the tidy, sleeping houses—and picked up on the next block, and then the block after that, and then the block where the new houses were being built, and the smell of wood and wet concrete wound through the air. When the path faded out, Jill found herself in a meadow, where she had never been before. Or perhaps she had—yes, she had been there, but now it looked strange, with sticky shafts of milkweed and patches of rough, sour grass pushing up from the mud. Next to her, a layer of chemical suds floated on a ditch. Though it was only twilight, Jill could see the red glare from where the city curved out in the distance, the fierce glare from the steel mills. Jill picked her way among huge spools of wire and pieces of track that lay about the burned-looking gro
und, and sooner or later she found a little house where she’d seen Evaline once, a long, long time ago, in a Sunday dress and a hat with wooden cherries on it. There were a few chicks in the yard, and some tires, and a half-buried old washing machine; and she must have skirted the city, because now she could even see the metal lozenges of the mills at its far side. I’d better hurry and go inside, she thought; because the greenish wedge of twilight was pressing down quickly upon her and the little house.

  In the bare wooden room that was the house, many people were waiting. Jill wandered around and around among them, but they paid no attention to her whatsoever, which was odd, Jill thought, because, of all those people—old people sitting and fanning themselves anxiously, and babies who sat, distracted and silent, on the floor—she herself was the only white one. But evidently the people there were concentrating on something, waiting for something that was going to happen, and they had no time for Jill, none at all. And just as she was growing beside herself with impatience, she saw a woman stirring something on the stove from which came rich, dark tendrils of aromas, streaked with traces of something that was familiar, although Jill couldn’t place it.

  “Don’t be rude,” said a voice in Jill’s ear. “You know what this is.”

  That’s disgustingly unfair, Jill thought, and I’m going to leave; I never wanted to be here in the first place. But she could not make her way through the crowded vigil—even though morning was soaking into her sleep, and she could feel Nick pick her up and carry her to the bed, she could not fight her way through.

  She was just starting to struggle in earnest when she saw the two boys—Roo’s James and her Joshua. They had gotten hold of some marvelous toy, a translucent sphere inside which tiny figures whirled and orbited, and Jill watched as the thing spun, lofting into the air. She caught her breath as James tensed, his tiny face pointed with effort, but before James could catch it, Joshua reached out. “It’s mine—” Joshua called, and, as the fragile thing bounced from the tips of Joshua’s fingers, Jill, too, reached and cried out, just managing to wake, her hair damp and clinging to her forehead, before James was able to open his mouth.

  Presents

  The waves go on and on—there is no farther shore; a boat here and there in the dark water, a cluster of fronds, an occasional sunset. Cheryl closes her eyes, and the warm night-blue water rushes out around her. “Think it’s really like that?” she asks. Cheryl’s voice is arresting—low, and with a city accent that gives each word the finality of a bead dropping into place along a string; sometimes strangers to whom she speaks pause before responding, and look, if they haven’t looked before. “Think it’s really that blue?”

  “Blue?” Carter glances down at his shirt. “Nothing’s this blue. Not even this. It’s the lights in here—make everything vibrate.” He tips the little glass bottle in his hand and spills a neat white line from it onto his forearm, which he extends to Cheryl with balletic solemnity.

  “You know what?” Cheryl says when her attention returns to Carter’s shirt. “It’s sort of…not beautiful, isn’t it? Sort of—”

  “Don’t insult my shirt,” Carter says. “Are you insulting my shirt? That’s not nice; it was a gift. I wonder why people wear these things, come to think of it. They’re ugly, they’re stale, they’re not even funny, but you can’t get rid of them. They disappear for a few years, then, wham, they’re back again, worse than before. Fact, I’m going to make a stand. I’ll never accept another one from anybody, I don’t care who tries to give me one.” He taps another line neatly out from the bottle onto his forearm and inhales it, all in one fluid sequence. “Don’t let anyone tell you I’ve lost my talent,” he says.

  Cheryl, leaning against the sink, smiles. “So what is it like?” she asks. “You been there?”

  “Huh?” Carter says. “Ah.” He presses his fingers against the corners of his eyes. “Yeah. I did a film there. It was like a film set. It was like a hotel room.”

  When Cheryl and Carter return from the men’s room, Danny is waiting at the table, with a fresh round of drinks, in exactly the same position they’d left him. His soft dark hair, his soft white skin, his muscular roundness, his stillness—he is dark and still enough to absorb all the clatter around him.

  When did Danny and Carter last see each other? Cheryl tries to figure it out. It must have been five or six years ago that Carter moved out to the Coast—long before Cheryl started going out with Danny—when she was just a child and would stop in here with her mother, Judith, for a hamburger and a soda before going back up the block to do her homework or go to sleep while Judith stayed on at the bar. Cheryl might well have seen Carter here in those days, but he would have been just one among many people who hung out at Danny’s table.

  Danny, of course, is delighted by Carter’s unexpected appearance tonight. He has often spoken of Carter to Cheryl—their friendship, to him, is a living thing. But Carter, who seemed comfortable enough downstairs in the men’s room with Cheryl, is formal here at the table, and querulously passive, as if he were being forced to wait for some event that would reveal to him exactly why, after all these years, he has taken the trouble to look Danny up.

  “Put quite a dent in this,” Carter says, handing the little bottle back to Danny.

  “That’s what it’s for,” Danny says. “You don’t even need to ask—it’s always here.”

  “‘Here’!” Cheryl says as Danny pats his pocket, surprising herself with her own disloyalty, but Carter only glances over at her as if taken unawares by some unidentified disturbance.

  “In fact”—Danny frowns slightly—“let me lay a little of this on you.”

  “No,” Carter says. “Thanks. This is—this is just old times’ sake.”

  “Well, that’s good, right?” Danny says. “I took a break recently myself.”

  “I work much better now,” Carter says. “Nothing to distort my concentration.”

  Danny nods, smoothing things over. Or, Cheryl wonders, has he really not noticed the cruelty of Carter’s remark. “They keep you pretty busy out there, I guess,” he says.

  “It’s not too bad,” Carter says. “Nothing too much for a while, though. Everything’s shit this year.”

  “Well,” Danny says, “we’re always glad to see your work here. Cheryl and me. Everyone.”

  Carter’s look, as it sweeps across the room possibly assessing conditions for departure, provokes a rustle of self-conscious laughter from girls at nearby tables.

  “Carter made a movie in Hawaii,” Cheryl interposes.

  “Hawaii,” Danny says. “Interesting. That’s interesting. I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “It was a while back,” Carter says.

  “You were doing a series just now, right?” Danny asks.

  “Right,” Carter says.

  “I haven’t seen that for a while,” Danny says.

  Carter smiles as if yielding to a barbed witticism. “The network said it was too specialized for the viewing public. Meaning the sponsors couldn’t follow the plot, so they took it off the air.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Danny agrees. “That’s what I thought. You know, I never saw that movie—I thought I’d seen all your movies.”

  “What movie?” Carter says. “Oh. Well, you might not have known. It was supposed to be—well, actually, it was supposed to be Hawaii, in fact, through some error of efficiency. Course they had to chop down the palm trees so there’d be room for the fake palm trees. But otherwise it was a good idea for a location. An exciting concept.”

  Danny laughs obligingly, but Carter’s irritability threatens to overflow and swamp the conversation.

  “At least you’ve got the shirt,” Cheryl says.

  Carter looks at her blankly, then down at his shirt. “Right,” he says. “Girl on the crew gave it to me,” he explains to Danny. “So I wear it from time to time, out of respect for her memory.”

  “Holy shit,” Danny says. “She died?”

  “Out of respect for h
er memory,” Carter insists. “Because I can’t remember her. Hair, I think. Or makeup. Except maybe I got it for myself, come to think of it, to remember myself by, because the thing about that movie was, my performance had the exact level of distinction and authenticity illustrated by this shirt.”

  Danny looks perturbed. “I don’t like to miss any of your work,” he says.

  “You would have liked to have missed this.”

  “It was probably a lot better than you think,” Danny says. “You probably just think that because of some personal situation or whatever. Anyhow, I’ll try to rent it.”

  A silence falls between the two men, in which Cheryl feels ensnared, implicated.

  “Anybody need to make a trip to the powder room?” Danny asks finally.

  “Thanks.” Carter pushes his glass away. “But I’ve got to sleep. I’m seeing those guys tomorrow.”

  “Look at that,” Danny says, turning to watch as Cheryl takes a sip of her drink, a frozen Margarita. “The things girls drink—green things, pink things. The things they do. I love it. Paint, curls, things that shine…”

  Carter looks at Cheryl. It is the first time, she thinks, that he has really looked at her. “Yes, indeed,” he says.

  “If it’s sleeping, don’t worry,” Danny says. “I’ve got something for later that’ll help with that.”

  Carter withdraws his look from Cheryl, erasing her. “Right,” he says, accepting the little bottle from Danny. “Anybody care to join me?”

  “I’m O.K. for the moment,” Danny says. Cheryl looks down at her drink.

  “I hate to see the guy so unhappy,” Danny says, watching solicitously as Carter disappears toward the men’s room. “He’s seeing those guys tomorrow, I guess. Well, he’s a good man.”

  “Excuse me a minute,” Cheryl says. The tentative, probing note in Danny’s voice is making her uneasy. “I want to say hi to Roy.”