The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  Gabriela frowned at a petal she was smoothing between her fingers. “He said terrible things. He said that we were thieves, you know, and so on. And it’s not as though any of us are thrilled with the way things are, of course, but after all—it is people like our parents who generate the entire economy here.” She sighed. “He said that people were starving. Heavens! You have to be stupid to starve in this climate, don’t you?” She turned to Sarah for confirmation and smiled gently. “The fruit simply drops off the trees.

  “Anyhow, during the next year, several of our workers and some of the other students—friends of Rubén’s—got killed and were found by the side of one road or another. So, even though none of them were from important families, we were all terrified for Rubén. And in fact it was late that same year that the first letter arrived.”

  Inside, in the soft light, we could see Gabriela’s parents and the McGees sipping their coffee and chatting contentedly. I closed my eyes and raised my face to the tiny white flowers above us, as though they were a spray of cool water.

  “And the letter stated it all in no uncertain terms—They knew who he was, they knew where he was, and so forth. Well, my father got on the phone right away, and started sending my brother to see important people. My father had friends in the police, and friends in the army. And he even had several friends in the Embassy—your embassy here—so we thought we could take care of it quickly enough. But every day went by, and everyone my brother talked to said they didn’t know anything about it—they couldn’t find out who was sending the letters. And one day Rubén went to see a colonel in the army, whom Rubén and I had known since we were babies—my father is the godfather of one of this man’s children. And Rubén came back from that meeting looking like a corpse.”

  A little leaf spiraled down through the air and landed on Gabriela’s dress. She picked it off and looked at it affectionately before she let it flutter away. “Because the Colonel said, you know, right away, that of course he’d help, and he made a phone call while Rubén was sitting right there in his office. The Colonel explained the situation over the phone to whoever it was he’d called, and then he just sat there on the phone, listening, for about twenty minutes, Rubén told us later. And when he hung up, Rubén asked what the other person had said, and the Colonel said, ‘Nothing.’”

  Gabriela stopped speaking for a moment, and as she resumed, Sarah’s cold hand rested briefly on mine. “So the Colonel stood up to walk Rubén to the door, and at the door he burst into tears. And he said, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help you. But now, listen to me, please—there’s something I have to say to you.’ He put his hands on Rubén’s shoulders and looked into his eyes, and said, ‘When you leave your house, be sure to tell somebody where you’re going. Always walk in the direction of traffic’”—Gabriela leaned up for a moment, as I had, into the cool spray of white flowers—“‘and be very, very careful when you cross the street.’”

  This morning particularly blue and bright. Ricardo’s greeting, María’s smile, the roses, the hummingbirds—everything bright, large, standing out in the blue air as though I’d been far away for a long time. Woke up famished. Couldn’t eat enough. Melon, grapefruit, pineapple, banana—I ate and ate. Thought of all that fantastic food last night, just sitting in front of me. Laughed slightly. “Horrible, wasn’t it?” I said to Sarah. “Thank God we’ll never have to do that again.” My fork scraped startlingly against my plate. “Sarah?” I said.

  Saw she hadn’t touched her fruit or her juice or her coffee. I speared a piece of banana and held it out to her. “No?” I said. Waved it temptingly. “All right, but you’ll be starving by the time we get to the airport.”

  She looked at me, then slammed her napkin down onto the table and stalked off.

  Made an embarrassed farewell to Ricardo, hurried to our room, where I found Sarah sitting, staring at me accusingly from the unmade bed—the geological record of the aeons of our horrible night, our tense, mid-sleep lovemaking during which the ghouls from Gabriela’s wild story rubbed their wicked little numbing dream hands and waited.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, as it dawned on me. “All right. I apologize, Sarah, all right? I’m a brute. I’m insensitive. I’m a white male.” Sarah folded her arms. “But frankly, my dear, it is a common expression. A manner of speaking. I rather imagine you’ve used it yourself upon occasion—”

  Sarah interrupted. “But guess what, Dennis? I’m the person who’s never going to be starving. Because that’s the person I am, as it turns out. I’m the same person as Dot, Dennis, the same person as Gabriela—”

  “Oh, come, now,” I said.

  “‘Oh, come now,’” Sarah said. She kicked savagely at the mattress. “Because don’t you get it? I mean this is a war, Dennis. We’re soldiers, and that’s our uniform.” She started to cry with a thin, infuriating animal anguish. “See, I don’t understand why I didn’t know that. I don’t understand why I haven’t read about all this in the newspaper.”

  “In the newspaper!” I said. “You don’t understand why you haven’t read about this in the newspaper? About what, please, Sarah—why you haven’t read about what?” Felt I was wading through a dark, cold river. An ashy river clogged with garbage and bones. “You don’t know why you haven’t read about who you are? In the newspaper? Do you consider that a front-page story? Sarah, listen to me. What are you trying to do to me? Are you trying to spoil all the good things? Yes, I suppose I should rush off to Zwicker and say, ‘Stop the presses, chief, there are some problems out there—rich people make more money than poor people. Life is unfair and people suffer.’ God knows, Sarah—it’s not as though I don’t agree with you, but think about it for a moment, please; use your head. You don’t read about yourself in the newspaper because that’s not what a newspaper is for. And you don’t read in the newspaper about the things that go on here, because the things that go on here aren’t news.”

  God, it was awful. Mortifying. Sarah sobbing, me ranting—was profoundly mortified by my outburst. Got blue in the face apologizing, while Sarah sniffled and hiccuped and packed her beautiful textiles, sneaking beleaguered glances over her shoulder at me as though I had forced her at gunpoint to buy them. Made me feel literally like the Gestapo.

  Thankfully, by the time we got to the airport she seemed to have exhausted herself—was just sleepy and absentminded, like a child after a tantrum.

  On the plane Sarah stared at her closed book as a thin shield of cloud glided beneath us, but I peered across her out the window to watch the little country beneath us vanish.

  Oh, the ravages of traveling. Poor Sarah. Unfamiliar rules, disturbance of one’s biological rhythms. Whole populations of new microbes…The plane went blood-dark for an instant; pale skin boiling up into sticky black welts, slow lines of black-windowed vans patrolling the pale mountains…

  Hadn’t even occurred to me before—I’m sick! Bet we both are. Bet we’ve both picked up some sort of parasite. Damn, damn! Well, God knows I tried to be careful.

  Oh, so much to do this week. Doctor. Work up a piece for Zwicker, of course. Unpack. Phone calls. Stacks of mail, naturally—naturally most of it catalogues. It’s funny, I always intend to throw them right out, but when it comes down to it I can never resist leafing through, to see all the idiotic junk—programmable toasters, telephones disguised as footballs—that someone has spent time dreaming up and someone will spend money to buy. Shook my head and forced a chuckle, but Sarah continued to look out the window. “Hey,” I said, tugging playfully at her sleeve. “I promised I’d take you to the Red Fox Inn tonight, remember?”

  “The Red Fox Inn?” Sarah looked at me, then a veil dropped over her expression, and she turned back to the window.

  All right. Yes, the planet is littered with bodies. No one’s going to dispute that—and the bodies are surrounded by clues. But what those clues mean, and where they point—well, that’s something else altogether, isn’t it?

  Took Sarah’s unresisting han
d, and for a moment feared I was going to burst into loud, raucous weeping. Strange airplane light showing the fatigue behind her closed eyes; showing the age, deep within her, boring its way to her surface.

  But will it improve, the world, if Sarah and I stay in and subsist on a diet of microwaved potatoes? Because I really don’t think so. I really don’t think—and this is something I’ll say to Sarah when she’s herself again, I suppose—that by the standards of any sane person it could be considered a crime to go to a restaurant. To go someplace nice. After all. Our little comforts—The velvet murmur, the dimming of the street as the door closes, the enfolding calm of the other diners…that incredible moment when the waiter steps up, smiling, to put your plate before you…

  In the Station

  Sounds stretch out in the station—footsteps, crackling announcements, rag ends of instructions and goodbyes echo and balloon, tangle in a mass that hangs high up under the sooty vaulting of transoms and girders. Far below, where a thin scurf of yellow electric light drifts among the newsstands and plaintive groups of benches, Dee Dee clutched her ticket and inspected rows of shiny candy bars and magazines. In the distance the station dissolves into a watery daylight where points of darkness appear, and swell, hissing, into trains.

  Dee Dee reached, then hesitated, as though she were choosing cards from a gypsy’s pack. “Pardon,” a man said shortly, jostling her as he plucked a newspaper from in front of her. The train, she remembered; the important thing was getting on the train.

  But where were Carl and Márta? Just a moment ago they had been walking toward the gate. She looked frantically at the flow of people—the line was already beginning to form: unhealthy-looking English families, ladies in twos, the occasional pampered businessman of the sort Dee Dee had seen in the restaurants, and, because it was summer, throngs of students, Americans especially, talking and lounging theatrically. Everyone wore the resolute, slightly exaggerated expressions of people beginning a journey, as though, fearing irremediable dislocation, they were determined to stamp themselves upon their own futures.

  The line collected, and swayed with an absent fretfulness as Dee Dee searched it for Carl and Márta. Ah—there they were, standing a little off to one side. And something was wrong: Márta shook her short, dark hair; her hands flew up. Carl shied as if she were bombarding him, in her pretty accent, with little pellets.

  Dee Dee started forward, then stopped. As though signaled by her panic, Carl and Márta turned. Dee Dee smiled uncertainly and waved with her bag of new magazines and candy. For a moment they simply looked at her.

  She went light with dread—she was a scrap of something blowing away from them, tumbling away in Márta’s somber, lashy gaze. Carl’s hair gleamed like stiff filaments of silk. Then he raised his hand in a false little wave of reassurance, and Dee Dee was standing in place again.

  Carl and Márta turned back to each other. “Carl,” Márta said, and Carl looked at her with terror, as though, Márta thought, she were some beast poised to destroy him.

  How enraging. How enraging; was he trying to make her say something terrible to him? Well, she just might; if Dee Dee didn’t show up soon to stop her, heaven only knew what she might say.

  Márta had been in a vicious mood since waking. She’d opened her eyes onto the freezing damp the English affected to consider summer, only to discover that her flatmate, Judit, had drunk the last of the coffee. “No more at all?” Márta demanded, ransacking the cupboard.

  “Not unless you remembered to pick some up,” Judit said, unmoved. “It was on your list. Oh, by the way, István called this morning.”

  Márta shut the cupboard doors with wonderful composure. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.

  “You were asleep,” Judit said. “Remember?”

  Márta sat. She ran her hands through her hair and listened to Judit’s spoon tinkle in her coffee cup. What a day for István to call. “What did he want?” she asked.

  “István?” Judit shrugged. “I could hardly interrogate him, could I?”

  The instant Judit disappeared into the bathroom to deplete the hot-water supply Márta dialed István. A courtesy; just to tell him she would be away for several weeks. With Carl. But István was out, of course. Or in—behind the sunny, mendacious message on his machine. Márta’s heart blackened; in with some girl, doubtless. Márta hung up without leaving a message.

  She’d hurried to the station, but Carl and Dee Dee had not arrived yet. How grim it was, dirty and glum—and, with all the rushing strangers, treacherously neutralizing; she could hardly remember who she herself was. So István had decided he wanted to see her again. Too late; too bad, for him.

  The air around her was stale with discarded hopes, angers, attitudes no longer useful to those who were traveling. She huddled on a bench to wait, beset by tales, half-heard in her childhood, of cold, of deportations, of police—events that filtered down like ineradicable pollutants from filthy times.

  When she saw Carl and Dee Dee coming toward her she merely looked at them, her chin lifted. While Dee Dee hung back, goggling and dawdling like a child, Carl greeted Márta with a crisp little kiss on each cheek. She was not charmed. Did he not see how she felt? Did he not care?

  She watched him as they waited in line for tickets. That limpid, meditative look of his! It was like a steel door, behind which he crouched, hiding.

  He handed Dee Dee her ticket. “Is there anything you want before we get on the train?” he said. “It won’t be so easy to find things in English, remember.”

  Dee Dee looked at him and put her hand over her mouth, then shambled off to a newsstand, leaving Márta to go to the train with Carl.

  Something was bothering Carl. That, at least, was obvious. Márta looked at him, but his studied air of reverie enforced her silence. Still, the trip had been his idea; he had wanted her to come along. At least, he had pretended to. “Carl,” she said.

  “Yes!” He turned to her with the transparently fraudulent expansiveness of someone forced to replace a tempting book on a shelf. “What is it?”

  She stared at him, searching his face. He didn’t want to go. Carl did not want to take this trip. It was true; Márta was certain—she had the curse of being right. “Tell me, Carl, please,” she said, “why we are doing this.”

  He flinched. “What do you mean?” he said, and then they both turned as though they’d been prodded from behind. Far down the station, Dee Dee stood in her bulky yellow slicker, a lost little lump, looking at them.

  Márta had met Carl some weeks earlier at a party she’d attended with István and Judit. István was being suspiciously attentive and delightful; many attractive women were present. István loved parties. He rose to the occasion of being admired, and his paintings were beginning to sell.

  Márta had been talking to István when a woman of fifty or so approached. She wore large pieces of ocher-smeared abalone on a thong around her neck and was known to collect paintings. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said to Márta in a voice like an electric drill, and turned her back.

  Her adornments, she was explaining to István, had once served as the currency of some now-impoverished coastal tribe. Márta began to drift away. István plucked at her sleeve, smiling merrily. She looked at him. He shrugged, and turned back to the woman.

  In the hot, lively room, Carl was conspicuous for his satiny blond melancholy. Márta placed herself on the arm of a sofa not far from him and gazed out the window at the brooding houses across the street.

  Carl drifted next to her and spoke easily, as though they shared some delicate and slightly sorrowful information. Was István watching? If so, certainly he would be jealous. Márta concentrated on sparkling empathetically up at Carl, but then understood that Carl was expecting her to respond to something. To what? she wondered. She made a modestly self-disparaging gesture. It served; Carl began to talk again.

  He was truly handsome, she realized. Her sparkle lapsed as she stared. Carl lowered his eyes; his smile was
clearly involuntary.

  “Do you know many people here?” Márta asked stubbornly through her blush. Over Carl’s shoulder, she saw István talking to a girl. The girl was as fragile and responsive-looking as a fawn. She had lovely, trustful eyes, and István was talking to her with the earnest concern that Márta recognized as the hallmark of his most gluttonous moments. Poison squirted into her veins. “Excuse me,” she said to Carl. “I have a simply splitting migraine.”

  Carl brought her to her flat. She was pale and silent. She had let István treat her too badly for too long; he expected her to put up with anything. And tonight, as she had peeked back into the party on her way out with Carl, István had glanced at her with cold dismissal.

  Carl settled her on the sofa. He wrapped a blanket around her feet, found aspirin and a glass of water, and stood back uncomfortably. How cramped and shabby the flat looked! In Carl’s impeccable Occidental presence Márta saw it clearly. When she looked up at Carl he brushed away the tiny tears that hung ornamentally from her lashes. “You must rest,” he said.

  Could she have bored him? “No, no,” she complained. “Sit and talk to me.” And he settled gingerly in a straight-backed chair. She hoped Judit would come in.

  But by the time Judit returned, Márta was alone, still curled up on the sofa with the blanket around her feet, reading a novel to nurse a frail feeling of well-being.

  Judit glowered. Judit and István had known each other from childhood in Budapest, and Judit took István’s side in everything. Márta had heard, from others of course, how for years Judit had tagged along after István, defended him, run errands for him; how she’d been ignored by him, except when he was sick or bored or wanted to meet one of her friends. “He isn’t going to call you again,” Judit said.