Leonard Michaels - The Men's Club

In the belly of my wineglass looped a ruby pool of zinfandel. Dumb good substance. Unlike Cavanaugh running after annihilation. I had nothing to say. He felt unknown. Irrelevant. Deer didn’t look at him. I didn’t either. I looked beyond his head when I glanced in his direction. I saw the wallpaper and a dish cabinet standing beside the kitchen door. Old yellow pine. Brown knots like birthmarks and a tall glass front. Deep shelves stacked with china and knickknacks, tiny pink pigs and dancing yokels. Porcelain sillies. It didn’t suit decent old pine. Neither did the wallpaper. In Kramer’s house nothing suited anything and all of it seemed chosen.

A house of blatant heart, yearnings for excitement, everywhere in different styles. Orange rug in the living room. Glossy acrylics on the walls. The opposite of puritanical is the savage energy of bad taste. Cavanaugh was pouring himself more wine. He said, ‘Come on, Terry. Your turn.”

“Yeah,” said Berliner, “tell us about Deborah Zeller.”

“Graduate student,” I said. Terry looked confused, as if he were waiting for us to tell him his story. “You said you almost married her, then you stopped talking.”

“Don’t be ashamed,” said Cavanaugh. “Don’t feel crap like that. Kramer’s right, man. This is the twentieth century. We didn’t come here tonight to feel ashamed.”

Canterbury said, “Oh, let him alone.” But he’d been quiet so long he’d lost the power of being heard. A psychological superfluity at this table, in this house. Lean ghostly fellow wearing glasses and pastels.

Terry said, “I believe I see your point, Cavanaugh. Shame is old-fashioned. I’ll write a paper on the subject for a medical journal. What should I feel in the meantime?”

“Feel guilt,” I said. “Tell what happened with Deborah Zeller. Don’t leave anything out.” I spoke as if to meet his irony, but I was thinking still of Cavanaugh. Though we’d been friends for years, he never talked of very personal matters. A sociologist says a woman appears half-naked at a party, but, with one man, she’d never dress that way. The principle applied here. In a crowd Cavanaugh could say any. thing.

Canterbury sneered at me, the expression fleeting, minimal, difficult to interpret. I wasn’t even sure I’d seen it. Had I offended him by urging Terry to talk? He was looking at me. I looked back, as if seeing him for the first time. Pale and blond. Lunar qualities. White negative space, like conscience. He said nothing. I looked down.

“It’s very silly,” said Terry. “Shortly after my divorce I met a woman named Deborah Zeller—”

“Wait,” cried Berliner, rising. “Shortly after my divorce I met a woman.” He was striding away, passing through the living room, heading for the stairs, running up, shouting, “Don’t say another word until I piss.”

Terry lowered his voice. “I married young. I didn’t know much about women.”

“I hear you,” shouted Berliner.

“Amazing,” said Terry. He waited. Everyone waited, including Deborah Zeller, the name so familiar it felt like a thing. Chunky. Bulging. Almost hot. My mother used to say, when I sneezed, “Somebody is talking about you.” I imagined Deborah Zeller sneezing, and, upstairs near the roof, Berliner. He stood with legs spread, like a statue at the bowl. The trousers of his gray polyester suit were open. He held his dick. Green eyes watched the urine plunge. He pissed long and long.

“I wait like an ox,” says Kafka. Masochists don’t mind waiting, but most people do. It’s a miserable, degrading thing, a social torture inflicted on convicts and dogs. I wondered if Berliner had a problem pissing. He’d said his body gave him trouble. He’d also said, “Don’t say another word,” and here we were, six male heads around a table, waiting in silence.

In the middle of the table lay a salmon head, like an emblem of our situation. Not so different from our heads — intact, open-eyed, stopped — except for the slick sheath of skin, trailing spine, murdered mouth. It looked as if it had been devoured in flight, so quickly devoured it was unaware that it was dead. A waiting look. Thus, I identified waiting and death. “My wife told me a waiting story,” I said, determined to disobey Berliner; to talk and not to feel dead.

Terry put down his fork and looked at me as if this subject — waiting — engaged him crucially. Perhaps it did. Doctors have waiting rooms. His attention, like his great bald head, made an impression of solidity and fullness. I didn’t feel equal to it, but I proceeded mechanically to talk.

“The story is about when she was a little girl and lived with her mother.”

“Yes,” said Terry.

“Her parents were divorced. Her mother worked.”

“Yes,” he said. The word pressed me like a finger. I picked up speed.

“She used to walk home from school alone. When she got to the apartment and put the key in the lock, she’d feel frightened. Her mother worked late. The apartment was always empty in the afternoon, but she imagined someone was inside, waiting for her. She’d open the door, hurry straight to the TV set, and sit down in front of it on the rug. She remained there until her mother came home. She wouldn’t move, wouldn’t even take off her coat and gloves. One afternoon, sitting close to the TV set, she had to wait longer than usual. It got dark. She flicked on the TV. A face appeared. It held her. A man in a white suit. He was talking to her. His voice was full of love. It was like ‘a deep silver spoon,’ she says. He was exhorting her to believe, telling her it was good to believe, and he kept on smiling as he talked, showing her how good it was. Alone in the dark apartment with this man talking to her, she heard herself begin whimpering, ‘I believe, I believe.’”

Terry smiled, then said, “I don’t get it.”

I felt a rush of embarrassment, as if I’d told a joke badly. Now, glancing at the salmon head, it was nothing but the head of a dead fish. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I don’t get it either. I could tell other stories that have no point. This often happens to me. I start to talk, thinking there is a point, and then it never arrives. What is it, anyhow, this point? Things happen. You remember. That’s all. If you take a large perspective, you’ll realize there never is a point. There’s only a perspective. For example, look at that salmon head. The poor dumb fish was swimming upstream and his head landed in that plate.”

“But I get it,” said Paul, turning an intimate face to me. “I see what you mean. I have an old friend named Mitch. He was always late. I was always waiting. Skinny guy with glasses and crooked teeth. He could give you a look, you’d crack up laughing. I loved him. Everybody loved him. Five years ago he phoned. I hadn’t heard his voice in a long time, but right away I said, ‘Mitch, Mitch. It’s you, for God’s sake.’ You know what he said? He said, ‘Who is this?’” Paul stopped and shook his head. To settle his feelings. Make them collect.

“He’d phoned me by accident. He was in Memphis and couldn’t stay on the line. Too expensive. I told him to hang up, let me call him. When I called, it was the wrong number. I was so frustrated I kicked the wall. Then I calmed down. I sat by the phone, staring at it, waiting, smoking cigarettes, praying it would ring. It didn’t ring. Then, last week — five years later — the phone rings and it’s Mitch. He says he’s in Berkeley. I recognized his voice right away and this was no mistake. He phoned me. He wanted to talk to me. I almost went crazy with happiness. He came by to my place, the same funny Mitch with the glasses, the crooked teeth. I asked if he remembered the time I loaned him fifty bucks. Years ago in New York. I had to get fifty bucks and meet him on a corner uptown, near the park. He sounded desperate. I ran to the bank. There was forty-two bucks in my account. I wrote a check for fifty. I was scared. Man, if some guard pulled his gun on me, I would have thought it was natural. But the bank was busy. Long lines. They cashed my check without looking. I asked Mitch if he remembered how cold it was, how it was snowing. He laughed. I could see he remembered. But talk about waiting. Man, I waited in the cold, fifty bucks balled up in my fist. Three hours late, Mitch arrives in a taxi. I couldn’t believe it. He shows up three hours late in a taxi with a dynamite black chick sitting beside him. He took the fifty bucks through the window. I didn’t even have change for the subway. I walked home. ‘I still owe you that fifty,’ he says. I told him forget it. Seeing him was worth more than fifty bucks. Then he says his luggage was lost at the airport and he has a big appointment in San Francisco. Could I lend him a tie and a nice pair of shoes? I found him a tie. The shoes were beautiful, handmade in London. A little tight, but they looked great. I’d worn them only once. Mitch said he could have them stretched. He knew a ‘cobbler’ in San Francisco, retired army officer who’d had an eye shot out in the Africa campaign. We laughed. Mitch always knows somebody. Whatever you want, he knows somebody. Drop Mitch anyplace in America, even in the world, he’ll have connections. He’ll know a guy who can fix your watch. Another guy who can do a first-class valve job, cheap. Another guy who can get you some coke. A woman whose sister’s boy friend can get you a machine gun. He knows a chiropractor who does abortions for twenty-five bucks. Mitch said he couldn’t hang around. He’d come back after his appointment. We could talk then. He wanted to hear how I’d been doing. He wanted to meet my wife and kids. He had things to tell me about himself. I was so excited I didn’t go to bed. What if I fell asleep and didn’t hear the doorbell? My wife woke me at four in the morning. I was asleep in the kitchen, my head on the table. She said, ‘Mitch isn’t coming.’ She pulled me upstairs to bed.”