The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  Although the tables are nearly full, the population at the bar is sparse, and Roy is killing time polishing glasses. “Would you look at this shit, please?” he says, holding a smudged glass up for Cheryl’s inspection. “Day-shift assholes.”

  Roy takes a personal pride in the ruin that is the world, and there are times when each of its details provides him with a welcome occasion for disgust. But Cheryl is perfectly at home with these moods of his; he has been more or less living with Judith for nearly seven years. “Could I have a soda, please, Roy?” she asks.

  “Knock it back, Princess,” Roy says, handing her a Coke.

  Cheryl simply doesn’t like the taste of alcohol, although on nights like this when she’s getting high she has to drink it to take the edge off. But it suits Roy to theorize, with infuriating magnanimity, that Cheryl’s reluctance to drink inevitably stems from some of the scenes Cheryl witnessed between Judith and his predecessors—real drinkers, problem drinkers, “walking slime” Roy has called them, and Judith and Cheryl agree—who beat Judith in unassuageable furies, as if she were losing her looks to spite them. Which she would have, she’s told Cheryl, if she had been in charge of the matter herself.

  When Roy and Judith are annoyed with Cheryl they accuse her of squeamishness, coldness, high-minded snottiness; they affect to believe that her habitual prudence is a matter of principle rather than temperament; they ridicule her roughly and coarsely, as though to present proof, by contrast, of the defects they attribute to her.

  At such times Danny, for his part, seems slightly gratified, as if these allegations were a guarantee of Cheryl’s quality. It is the silken coolness of Cheryl’s face and hair that he praises; he praises her reserve. He declares that he would marry her on the spot, but this appears to be an axiom, which requires no response. He does not make it necessary for her to examine her feelings about him—as he is the first to point out, she is very young.

  “So, Carter back to stay?” Roy asks.

  Cheryl shrugs. “He’s looking into a few projects,” she says, trying out Carter’s word. “He might do a play.”

  “Ho,” Roy says. “Greasepaint. Footlights. Very tony. He’s looking kind of nervous. He got stagefright already?”

  “He’s not nervous,” Cheryl says.

  “He looks nervous. He looks like shit. And no wonder. He hasn’t made a decent picture since Apple Pie, you realize that? I understand he’s got himself a bit of a reputation these days. Fooling around, making demands, and so forth. Very high-handed.”

  “Guess they keep you pretty well informed about him, Roy.”

  “Hey. You read things. You hear things.”

  Evidently Roy is determined to bully her tonight. Cheryl has spent the last few days at Danny’s, and it must be that in her absence Judith has been singing her praises, or the praises of some father of Cheryl’s that Judith has invented for the purpose of torturing Roy. Well, good. Cheryl wishes her mother were around right now. For once, Judith’s rash mockery, her raucous slatternly astuteness would be a pleasurable danger—a relief from Roy’s goading prissiness and the indecipherable pressures emanating from Danny. “Is Mother coming in tonight?” she asks.

  “I expect she’ll show up in due course,” Roy says. “To get a load on. At least, she didn’t give me reason to presume she had alternative plans. Naturally she would of been here already if she’d known who you and Danny were entertaining.”

  Judith always snorts at the mention of Carter. Nothing personal—merely that she’s bound to be skeptical in regard to the sudden celebrity of a familiar face.

  “He come in to score tonight?” Roy asks.

  “He came in to see Danny,” Cheryl says.

  “Uh-huh,” Roy says.

  “He’s clean.”

  “He’s clean,” Roy says. “He just likes to hang out in the can ’cause he feels insecure in public. Ah, time was he’d come in, he and his buddies from acting class, the picture of innocence, slumming. Fresh-faced silly-ass kids putting away the beer and shooters, thinking up things to deplore. Seems like no time at all before he’s over at Danny’s table.”

  Cheryl sighs. What does she care?

  “Speaking of which,” Roy says, “you tell that boyfriend of yours I want a word with him. Guess he’s forgotten me in all the excitement.”

  “Take it easy, Roy. If Danny said he’d do something for you he’ll do it.”

  “And you watch yourself, my girl,” says Roy, smug and fatherly now that he’s managed to exasperate her. “It’s a known fact this guy’s a demon with women.”

  “Grab your stuff, sweetheart,” Danny tells Cheryl when she returns to the table. “We’re going up to Carter’s for a bit.”

  Cheryl hesitates. But Danny seems at ease, perfectly in control, and he is waiting. “You have to be up in the morning?” she asks Carter.

  “No, no.” Carter speaks with an automatic, beleaguered graciousness. “Be nice if you drop by. It’s still early.”

  “It’s early,” Danny says, putting an arm around her. “We won’t stay long.”

  They stop at the bar on their way out, and Roy extends an enormous hairy arm, spreading a wide but transparent smile over cold appraisal. “Great to see you back again,” he says.

  “Great, yeah, great to see you,” Carter says, abashed.

  “Going to stick around for a while?” Roy says.

  “Depends on whether a few things work out,” Carter says.

  “Well, best of luck to you.” Roy’s smile becomes still wider and more punishing as Carter becomes more uncomfortable. “Don’t be a stranger, now.” Cheryl can just hear Roy telling Judith later how arrogant Carter has become. She can just see the two of them shaking their heads over it, over life. But why should Carter remember Roy, anyway?

  “Here you go,” Danny says, handing Roy an issue of New York.

  “I read this one already,” Roy says obtusely.

  “Page 38,” Danny says. “A terrific article. I saved it for you.”

  Roy’s puzzled frown transmutes into a huge and genuine grin. “My man,” he says, and at this moment he and Danny could be father and son, united in the intricate execution of some athletic feat. Danny can always bring out the best in Roy, and sometimes when Cheryl sees them together she is reminded of the time, when she was eleven or so, that Judith discovered Roy behind the bar here and brought him back home with her. What a surprise he’d been—good-looking and boyish. Engaging, genial. Roy: a miracle.

  “If my mother comes in—” Cheryl says.

  “What, tell her what?” Roy says peevishly.

  “Oh, fuck off, Roy,” Cheryl says.

  “The guy’s practically family,” Danny explains to Carter on the way uptown. “He lives with Cheryl’s old lady—remember? Judith?”

  Carter shakes his head. He appears not to be concentrating.

  “She’s one terrific lady,” Danny says. “Very talented. She was Miss New York State one year. You should see some of those old pictures of her. Gorgeous. Looks just like Cheryl in a funny bathing suit. Same eyes, same legs, same hair.”

  There was a time when people frequently asked if Cheryl and Judith were sisters, but now Judith’s kitten face is pouchy with alcoholic malice and sentimentality.

  “She’s quite a character, quite a lady,” Danny says. “She used to be a dead ringer for Cheryl.”

  “Is that right?” Carter says.

  Although Judith is not quite forty, what people now say is “She must have been a good-looking woman at one time.”

  “Dead ringer,” Cheryl says, again disloyal. And when Carter directs to her a slow smile, rich with bitter complicity, she is as shocked and shamed and thrilled as if she herself had voiced some declaration.

  As soon as Danny empties a gram bottle onto Carter’s shiny dark coffee table, it is Cheryl who digs in, using the tiny gold spoon Danny had given her as sort of a joke shortly after they started going out. “Like getting pinned,” he’d said. “You know about that? Like th
ose old-time beach-party movies.” Danny loves movies, particularly ones—his friends—that date from his early childhood.

  Cheryl feels steadier right away, and decides to strike off on her own and explore. It seems that this is a hotel, or something like a hotel. There had been a uniformed man in the elevator, and there were many elevators, or several at least, and downstairs in the lobby other uniformed men, and, distantly, in a dim gilded recess, something like a desk, Cheryl now realizes, and beyond that a huge set of double doors, glassy but dark, possibly leading to a restaurant where there would be heavy white cloths on the tables, and waiters in white jackets.

  Cheryl goes from Carter’s living room back to his small foyer and chooses one of several doors. Although the building seems old and solid, the rooms in this apartment have an almost abstract regularity, and they flow from one to another—chambers and chambers, Cheryl thinks—in a random manner, as if the phenomena of daily life eluded categorization. The furniture, also stripped of the burdens of particularity, is unused-looking, and here and there is a clean glass ashtray holding a matchbook.

  Eventually Cheryl comes across a room where there is an enormous bed, and she stretches out upon it, taking care to keep her shoes from touching the stiff, glossy spread. There are a number of doors in this room, too, and large mirrors on three of the walls. But the wall to Cheryl’s left is almost entirely glass.

  She is in the sky here, and rolled out beneath her, a spectacular toy, is the Park. At its borders the shadowy towers of toy buildings, flecked with gold windows, rise into the night. And inside the Park pale light from globy lamps coats the branches and trunks of trees in a soft gleam. It is still early enough in the year so that no leaves hide the shapes of these trees. A little car glides through them soundlessly, along a curving drive. There are no sounds here whatsoever, behind the heavy glass, and no motion of air.

  What sorts of trees are those, below her, Cheryl wonders. What shapes will their leaves be? Cheryl imagines that she herself is here to make these decisions. She imagines the toy people below looking up expectantly, searching the windows for her face—the giant serious face of the child who is to arrange their toy lives.

  Cheryl stands, causing a phalanx of Cheryls, not children at all, to rise in the mirrors. The bedspread retains no impression of her body, and, more strangely, the first door she opens leads directly back into the living room, where Carter and Danny are.

  Danny is happily going through a stack of movie cassettes, most of which feature Carter, and Carter has evidently called down for drinks. Danny locates The Timekeeper, his favorite of Carter’s movies, and puts it on the machine. Harsh splinters of light are flung out into the room, and Danny watches, rapt, as Carter appears onscreen and proceeds, with fever-pitch caution, to break into a safe. The corporeal Carter, however, perches nervously on the arm of the sofa where Danny and Cheryl sit, and from time to time he springs up to range back and forth as if he were tethered to the screen, until a room-service waiter arrives with drinks, releasing him.

  The waiter pauses for a moment, watching a tiny wind-whipped Carter climbing down a fire escape, before he sets the drinks down on the coffee table. “That was a terrific film, Mr. Hall.”

  “Thank you,” Carter says. He signs the check and hands the waiter a large tip. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the waiter says, lingering by the sofa. “I admire your work tremendously.”

  “Oh—” Carter looks around, but as Danny is resolutely staring at the screen, he is forced to assume the role of host. “Please,” he says, handing the waiter a book of matches from the ashtray on the coffee table. “Help yourself.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” The waiter produces a beautiful professional smile. Perhaps he, too, is an actor. Deftly and authoritatively he scoops a small portion from the white mound on the coffee table onto the matchbook cover, lifting it to his right nostril, and inhales quickly. Cheryl thinks of him downstairs in the restaurant she has imagined there, tossing salads and carving roasts on a silver trolley. Is this something she has ever seen in real life, she wonders. The waiter repeats the operation, using his left nostril.

  “Outstanding,” he says. His eyes rest briefly on Cheryl and Danny, who are motionless on the sofa, staring at the screen. Then he puts the matchbook down on the coffee table in front of them with a little click. “Well, thank you, sir,” he says to Carter.

  “Thank you,” Carter says. “Thanks very much.” He closes the door behind the waiter and returns to stand behind the sofa.

  “Look at that,” Danny says to Cheryl, pointing at the screen with proprietary pleasure.

  The waiter has left a bottle of Finnish vodka on ice, and a large bottle of soda, and three setups, and although Carter has also requisitioned a frozen Margarita, Cheryl decides in favor of vodka-and-soda. This is one evening she intends to stay high, and it may take a fair amount of alcohol to maintain her current fine equilibrium. She doesn’t want to throw a whole lot of sugar on top of that.

  “Look,” Danny says. “We’re coming up to the part on the bridge.”

  “I can’t watch this,” Carter says. But what he can’t seem to do is turn away.

  “How the hell do you do that?” Danny asks as Carter appears, shirtless in a slushy rain, running along a bridge. “You look like you were dying of fear.”

  “I was dying of fear,” Carter says. “I was fucking dying of fear. We were all fucking dying of fear. It was probably the coldest day of the last twenty years, the bridge was iced over, no one could agree how to set up the shot. Everybody was slipping around like fish—we almost lost the camera operator a few times.”

  “Very dedicated guy, huh?” Danny says respectfully.

  “On top of that, we all had some kind of flu, but we couldn’t slow down—we were already four days behind schedule because the first director turned out to be a bit of a junkie and got himself fired and replaced with this kid who’d never done a feature before, although of course when this came out he was red hot until his second one came out. Now he can’t get a job in the mailroom. So there’s some bondsman standing around waiting to grab the film if this kid falls one more second behind, and the producer’s there, too, and they’re watching each other and the director like ferrets and trading antibiotics, and alternating trips to the bathroom to throw up, and everything is one, two takes, and meanwhile—” But Carter’s sentence is fractured by a volley of bullets as well as a loud buzzing. “Excuse me,” he says. He looks irritated, but Cheryl thinks there’s a note of satisfaction in his voice. “House phone.”

  Carter disappears into the foyer and returns a minute or so later with a tall woman whose hair is just a bit longer and lighter than Cheryl’s. So exaggerated are the slenderness and curvature of this woman’s lines that she seems to be on the other side of some distorting lens.

  “My, my,” the woman says. She drops her jacket on the sofa near Danny. “Home movies.”

  Carter shrugs, but he walks wearily to the set and turns it off.

  “Hey,” Danny protests, in a jokey, affectionate manner.

  Carter pushes his hair back with both hands. “Suzannah, Danny, Cheryl,” he says.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Danny says.

  “You were going to call me, Carter,” Suzannah says.

  “I forgot,” Carter says.

  Danny is the first to recover, and he undertakes the task of setting things right. “Help yourself,” he says to Suzannah, indicating the mound on the coffee table.

  Suzannah seems to have been waiting for this offer. “No, thank you,” she says quickly and coldly. She stares at some point embedded in space, but an awful disorder atomizes the room again, and she shifts ground, sitting down next to Cheryl. “I had a brutal day,” Suzannah says confidingly to her. “I’ve simply got to sleep—I have to look halfway decent tomorrow.”

  Cheryl is happy to fall in with Suzannah’s childish amiability. “Are you a model?” she asks.

  “I’m an actress,” Suza
nnah says, no longer amiable.

  Carter laughs softly, and Suzannah stands up. “How did the audition go?” Carter asks.

  “Very well, thanks,” Suzannah says. She walks over to the TV and starts the tape again. “I won’t keep you. I just came by to pick up a few things.”

  “Absolutely.” Carter’s voice is enmeshed in the flickering of the movie. “Go right ahead.” Pointedly he picks up the matchbook and hunkers down by the coffee table.

  Suzannah pauses at the door to the bedroom. “I thought you had a meeting in the morning,” she says.

  “I do,” Carter says.

  “We should go,” Cheryl says to Danny.

  “Don’t leave,” Carter says, putting his hand out to Cheryl. His eyes shadow as he looks up at her. Then once again he bends over the table, but this time Suzannah doesn’t look—she has gone into the bedroom.

  “Can we go back?” Danny says. “We missed a lot on the bridge.” He rewinds the tape himself, then sits down again, with his hands behind his head. “Ah,” he says as Carter materializes in front of them shirtless and half crazed with panic.

  Carter watches with intense concentration from the arm of the sofa, but before his image even reaches the bridge he gets up to replay the beginning of the scene. Danny seems not to mind Carter’s intervention, even when Carter stops the tape to stare at a frame, which he does several times. In fact, Danny only nods, as if Carter had carried out an impulse of his own. Danny seems to be growing more and more at home here, at the same time that Carter seems to be growing more and more distressed, held in thrall by the figure on the screen.

  In the bedroom Suzannah, with unnecessary energy and commotion, is taking from a closet and a bureau drawer items of clothing which she then folds and puts into a Bloomingdale’s bag. Cheryl watches from the doorway, but the mirrors have caught the dense, subtle colors of the Park, and on top of them, in serially reflected planes, the dark bed floats irresistibly. Suzannah continues to stride back and forth as Cheryl enters and lies down on the bed, her hair fanning out. If one of them leaves, Cheryl thinks, there will still be an infinite number of people in the mirrors. But “if two of us leave,” she comments aimlessly, aloud, “there won’t be any people at all.”