The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

O.K., first in the phone book, true enough. (“See display ad, page 182.”) “Hi,” Francie said when the man answered. “This is Francie McIntyre. The girl who fainted yesterday? Could you—” For an instant, Miss Healy stood in front of her again, looking helpless. “First of all,” Francie said. “I mean, thanks for the water. But second of all, could you give me my father’s address, please? And, I guess, his name.”

  Kevin McIntyre—not all that amazing, once you got your head around the notion that he happened to be alive. And he lived on a street called West Tenth, in New York City. Francie looked out the window to the place where there had been for some years now a silently shrieking crowd and a puddle of blood, into which long, splotty raindrops were now falling. Strange—it was raining into the puddle, but at the level of the window it was snowing.

  In the closet she found an old plastic slicker. She took it from the hanger and wrapped it around the cardboard box, securing it roughly with tape. Yes, everything had to be just right. But the only thing she’d actually said to Francie in all these sixteen years was a lie.

  Francie looked around at the bluish stillness. “Hello hello,” she called. Was that her voice? Was that her mother’s silence, fading? What had become of everything that had gone on here? “Hello hello,” she said. “Hello hello hello hello…”

  The bus ticket cost Francie eighteen dollars. Which left not all that much of the seventy-three and a bit that she’d saved up, fortunately, to get her back to school and, in fact, Francie thought, to last for the rest of her life. “But, hey,” Jessica returned just long enough to point out, “you’ll be getting free therapy.”

  Francie put her box on the overhead rack and scrambled to a window seat. West Tenth Street. West of what? The tenth of how many? How on earth was she going to find her way around? If only her mother had let her go last year when Jessica invited her to spend Thanksgiving in New York with her family. But Francie’s mother had been able to picture Jessica’s mother just as easily as Francie had been able to. “Out of the question,” she’d said.

  “…if there’s no spouse…” So, her mother must have used his name on that form! They must never have got a divorce. Could he be a bigamist? Some people were. And he might think Francie was coming to blackmail him. He might decide to kill her right then and there—just reach over and grab a…a…

  Well, one thing—he wasn’t living on the street; she had his address. And he wasn’t totally feebleminded; he’d sent a fax. whatever he was, at least what he wasn’t was everything except that. And the main thing he wasn’t, for absolute certain, was a guy who’d been mashed by a bus.

  “Would you like a hankie?” the lady in the seat next to Francie’s asked, and Francie realized that she had wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve. “I have one right here.”

  “Oh, wow,” Francie said gratefully, and blew her nose on the handkerchief the lady produced from a large, shabby cloth sack on her lap.

  Despite the shabbiness of the sack, Francie noticed, the lady was tidy. And pretty. Not pretty, really, but exact—with exact little hands and an exact little face. “Do you live in New York?” she asked Francie.

  “I’ve never even been there,” Francie said. “My roommate from school invited me to visit once, but my mother wouldn’t let me go.” Jessica’s family had a whole apartment building to themselves, Jessica had told her; she’d called it a “brownstone.” It was when Francie had foolishly reported this interesting fact that her mother put her foot down. “Actually,” Francie added, “I think my mother was afraid. We had a giant fight about it.”

  “A mother worries, of course,” the lady said. “But it’s a lovely city. People tend to have exaggerated fears about New York.”

  “Yeah,” Francie said. “Well, I guess maybe my mother had exaggerated fears about a lot of things. She—” The box! Where was the box? Oh, there—on the rack. Francie’s heart was beating rapidly; clashing in her brain were the desire to reveal and the desire to conceal what had become, in the short course of the conversation, a secret. “Do you live in New York?” she asked.

  “Technically, no,” the lady said. “But I’ve spent a great deal of happy time there. I know the city very well.”

  Francie’s jumping heart flipped over. “Have you ever been to West Tenth Street?” she asked.

  “I have,” the lady said.

  Francie didn’t dare look at the lady. “Is it a nice street?” she asked carefully.

  “Very nice,” the lady said. “All the streets are very nice. But it seems a strange day to be going there.”

  “It’s strange for me,” Francie said loudly. “My mother died.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” the lady said. “My mother died as well. But evidently no one was hurt in the accident.”

  “Huh?” Francie said.

  “Amazing as it seems,” the lady said, “I believe no one was hurt. Although you’d think, wouldn’t you, that an accident of that sort—a blimp, simply sailing into a building…”

  Francie felt slightly sickened—she wasn’t going to have another opportunity to tell someone for the first time that her mother had died, to learn what that meant by hearing the words as she said them for the first time. “How could a blimp just go crashing into a building?” she said crossly.

  “These are things we can’t understand,” the lady said with dignity.

  Oops, Francie thought—she was really going to have to watch it; she kept being mean to people, and just completely by mistake.

  “‘How could such-and-such a thing happen?’ we say,” the lady said. “As if this moment or that moment were fitted together, from…bits, and one bit or another bit might be some type of mistake. ‘There’s the building,’ people say. ‘It’s a building. There’s the blimp. It’s a blimp.’ That’s the way people think.”

  Francie peered at the lady. “Wow…” she said, considering.

  “You see, people tend to settle for the first explanation. People tend to take things at face value.”

  “Oh, definitely,” Francie said. “I mean, absolutely.”

  “But a blimp or a building cannot be a mistake,” the lady said. “Obviously. A blimp or a building are evidence. Oh, goodness—” she said as the bus slowed down. She stood up and gave her sack a little shake. “Here I am.”

  “Evidence…” Francie frowned; Cynthia’s red jacket flashed against the snow. “Evidence, of, like…the future?”

  “Well, more or less,” the lady said, a bit impatiently, as the bus stopped in front of a small building. “Evidence of the present, really, I suppose. You know what I mean.” She reached into her sack and drew out some papers. “You seem like a very sensitive person—I wonder if you’d be interested in learning about my situation. This is my stop, but you’re welcome to the document. It’s extra.”

  “Thank you,” Francie said, although the situation she’d really like to learn about, she thought, was her own. “Wait—” The lady was halfway down the aisle. “I’ve still got your handkerchief—”

  “Just hold on to it, dear,” the lady called back. “I think it’s got your name on it.”

  The manuscript had a title, The Triumph of Untruth: A Society That Denies the Workings of the World Puts Us at Ever Greater Risk. “I’d like to introduce myself,” it began. “My name is Iris Ackerman.”

  Hmm, Francie thought: Two people with situations, sitting right next to each other. Coincidence? She glanced up. The sickening thing was, there were a lot of people on this bus.

  “My name is Iris Ackerman,” Francie read again. “And my belief is that one must try to keep an open mind in the face of puzzling experiences, no matter how laughable this approach may subsequently appear. For many years I maintained the attitude that I was merely a victim of circumstance, or chance, and perhaps now my reluctance to accept the ugliness of certain realities will be considered (with hindsight!) willful obtuseness.”

  Francie’s attention sharpened—she read on. “Certainly my persecution (by literally thousands of
men, on the street, in public buildings, and even, before I was forced to flee it, in my own apartment) is a known fact. (One, or several, of these ruffians went so far as to hide himself in my closet, and even under my bed, when least expected.)

  “Why, you ask, should so large and powerful an organization concentrate its efforts on tormenting a single individual? This I do not know. It is not (please believe me) false humility that causes me to say I do not consider myself to be in any way ‘special.’”

  Francie sighed. She rested her eyes for a moment on the weedy lot moving by out the window. Not much point, probably, trying to figure out what Iris had been talking about. Yup, she should have known the minute Iris said the word “blimp.”

  “I know only,” the manuscript continued, “that there was a moment when I fell into the channel, so to speak, of what was ultimately to be revealed as ‘my life’: In the fall of 1965, when I was twenty years old, I encountered a mathematics professor, an older man, whom I respected deeply. I became increasingly fascinated by certain theories he held regarding the nature of numbers, but he, alas, misunderstood my youthful enthusiasm, and although he had a wife and several children, I was soon forced to rebuff him.

  “I continued to feel nothing but the purest and most intense admiration for him, and would gladly have continued our acquaintance. Nevertheless, this professor (Doctor N.) terminated all contact with me (or affected to do so), going so far as to change his telephone number to an unlisted one. Yet, at the same time, he began to pursue me in secret.

  “For a period of many months I could detect only the suggestion of his presence—a sort of emanation. Do you know the sensation of a whisper? Or there would sometimes be a telltale hardening, a crunchiness, near me. Often, however, I could detect nothing other than a slight discoloration of the atmosphere…And then, one day, as I was walking to the library, he was there.

  “It was a day of violent heat. People were milling on the sidewalks, waiting. One felt one was penetrating again and again a poisonous, yellow-gray screen that clung to the mouth and the nostrils. I had almost reached the library when I understood that he was behind me. So close, in fact, that he could fit his body to mine. I had never imagined how hard a man’s arms could feel! His legs, too, which were pressed up against mine, were like iron, or lead, and he dug his chin into my temple as he clamped himself around me like a butcher about to slash the throat of a calf. I cried out; the bloated sky split, and out poured a filthy rain. The faces of all the people around me began to wash away in inky streaks. A terrible thing had happened to me—A terrible thing had happened—it was like water gushing out of my body.

  “Since then, my life has not belonged to me. Why do I not go to the authorities? Of course, I have done so. And they have added their mockery to the mockery of my tormentors: Psychological help! Tell me: Will ‘psychological help’ alter my history? Will ‘psychological help’ locate Dr. N.? Any information regarding my case will be fervently appreciated. Please contact: Iris Ackerman, P.O. Box 139775, Rochester, N.Y. Yours sincerely, Iris Ackerman.”

  Enclaves of people wrapped in ragged blankets huddled against the walls of the glaring station. Policemen sauntered past in pairs, fingering their truncheons. Danger at every turn, Francie thought. Poor Iris—it was horrible to contemplate. And obviously love didn’t exactly clarify the mind, either.

  You had to give her credit, though—she was brave. At least she tried to figure things out, instead of just consulting, for example, the wall. To really figure things out. Francie blew her nose again. For all the good that did.

  Any information regarding my case will be fervently appreciated. But this was not the moment, Francie thought, to lose her nerve. The huge city was just outside the door, and there was no one else to go to West Tenth Street. There was no one else to hear what she had to hear. There was no one else to remember her mother with accuracy. There was no one else to not get the story wrong. There was no one else to reserve judgment. Francie closed one hand tightly around her new handkerchief, and with the other she gripped the handle on her box. The city rose up around her through a peach-colored sunset; now there was no more time.

  The man who stood at the door of the apartment (K. McIntyre, #4B) was nice-looking. Nice-looking, and weirdly unfamiliar, as if the whole thing, maybe, were a complete mistake, Francie thought over and over in the striated extrusion of eternity (that was then and this is then; that was now and this is now) it had taken the door to open.

  She was filthy, she thought. She smelled. She’d been wearing the same dress, the same socks, for days.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  He had no idea why she was there! “Kevin McIntyre?” she said.

  “Not back yet,” he said. His gaze was pleasant—serene and searching. “Any minute.”

  He brought her into a big room and sat her down near a fireplace, in a squashy chair. He reached for the chain of a lamp, but Francie shook her head.

  “No?” He looked at her. “I’m having coffee,” he said. “Want a cup? Or something else—water? Wine? Soda?”

  Francie shook her head again.

  “Anyhow,” he said. “I’m Alex. I’ll be in back if you want me.”

  Francie nodded.

  “Can I put your package somewhere for you, at least?” he asked, but Francie folded her arms around the box and rested her cheek against its plastic wrapping.

  “Suit yourself,” the man said. He paused at the entrance to the room. “You’re not a very demanding guest, you know.”

  Francie felt his attention hesitate and then withdraw. After a moment, she raised her head—yes, he was gone. But then there he was again in the entranceway. “Strange day, huh?” he paused there to say. “Starting with the blimp.”

  The night before Francie left school, when she’d known so much more about her mother and her father than she knew now, she and Jessica had lain in their beds, talking feverishly. “Anything can happen at any moment,” Jessica kept exclaiming. “Anything can just happen.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Francie had said (and she could still close her eyes and see Cynthia coming up that hill). “It’s much, much worse.” And Jessica had burst into noisy sobs, as if she knew exactly what Francie meant, as if it were she who had brushed against the burning cable of her life.

  Her body, Francie noticed, felt as if it had been crumpled up in a ball—she should stretch. Strange day. Well, true enough. That was something they could all be sure of. This room was really nice, though. Pretty and pleasantly messy, with interesting stuff all over the place. Interesting, nice stuff…

  Twilight was thickening like a dark garden, and paintings and drawings glimmered behind it on the walls. As scary as it was to be waiting for him, it was nice to be having this quiet time. This quiet time together, in a way.

  Peach, rose, pale green—yes, poor guy; it might be a moment he’d look back on—last panels of tinted light were falling through the window. He might be walking up the street this very second. Stopping to buy a newspaper.

  She closed her eyes. He fished in his pocket for change, and then glanced up sharply. Holding her breath, Francie drew herself back into the darkness. It’s your imagination, she promised; he was going to have to deal with her soon enough—no sense making him see her until he actually had to.

  Across the Lake

  At first, what Rob saw from the back seat appeared to be projections of stone on the bluff just above—columns of lava, or basalt. Then the smoky morning split into gold rays, the black forms flickered human/mineral, human/mineral, and a shift of sun flashed against machetes, lighting up for one dazzling instant the kerchiefs tied over faces as masks, and the clothing—the wide, embroidered Indian trousers that Mick and Suky were headed toward the village to buy.

  “Hoo hoo!” Mick said. “Worth the trip?” But his hand, extended for Suky’s cigarette, was unsteady. How long, Rob wondered; how much longer until they reached the village?

  When they arrived, he would eat someth
ing with Mick and Suky, maybe even check into the hotel, but he would look around for some way to get back to town immediately. There would be other tourists with cars, and there was supposed to be a boat, a little boat that carried mail across the lake, between town and the village to which they were going on the far side. In any case, he could hardly say it was Mick and Suky’s fault that he had come; the fact was, he had knowingly—no, eagerly—given himself over to them, to these people he never would have dreamed of getting into a car with at home. And if something happened—if the guerrillas reappeared, or if there were robbers, or if he got sick, or if, most terrifying of all, they were stopped by the army—he would have only himself to blame.

  Suky’s small, tanned arm, draped across the seat, sparkled faintly. Her shoulder, the back of her neck…The car fishtailed and Rob turned his gaze to the steaming lake. Himself, himself to blame, himself, only himself. Perspiration—forming below the surface, squeezing its way up to collect in basins around each gold stalklet of a hair, in tiny, septic, bejeweling drops.

  According to Mick, the crumbly, bunkerlike building they checked into was the village’s premier hotel, the dirty pavilion where they sat now under a swarming thatch was the village’s premier restaurant. “Only restaurant,” Suky amended lazily. “Well, yeah, there’s one other, but Mick got a wicked parasite there last year.”

  What difference did it make? Rob would be back on his way to town soon enough.

  “Chicken everyone?” Mick said. “Always tasty, always safe.” He put down the sticky menu and turned with a little bow to the child who was swinging idly against a chair, waiting to take their orders. “Tres pollos.”

  The child considered Mick before responding. “Pollo no hay,” he said impassively.

  “Pués,” Mick said, “pescado. Bien fresco.”

  “Pescado no hay,” the child said.

  “Bueno”—Mick folded his arms and leveled a ferocious grin at the child—“Carne.”