Leonard Michaels - The Men's Club

“She put her tongue in your mouth. That’s how you knew?”

“It was words. How come I didn’t have the words until then? Once I took a class in night school. Great Ideas of the West. I bought a special notebook to write down what the professor said. But I didn’t write anything. He was always saying, like, ‘How do I know this table exists?’ A fucking table. That’s no problem. It’s so boring it has to exist. The problem isn’t tables, you dig? I got stupid sitting in that class, paying money to hear a shmuck talk about tables.”

Berliner was himself again.

“The problem isn’t tables,” I said. “The problem is knowing.”

“The problem is everything,” said Berliner. “Like some guy stops me in the street. He says, ‘Which way is the courthouse?’ I look at my right hand. Then I say, because I know the other hand is left, ‘Go left at the corner.’ I need to see my right hand, you dig?”

“If the courthouse was a right turn, you’d look at your left hand?”

“No, man. I’d look at my cock.”

Terry said, “I’ve got something to say.” He had to speak through Berliner’s laughter.

I said, “Berliner, that was a sad story.”

“It was,” said Paul, looking at Berliner with admiration. “I know what you’re talking about. It happened to me, too.” He was trying to make up for his failure to understand Berliner earlier, trying to repair the break in their communion. Not so much a drug brother as a kid brother; he adored Berliner.

Terry frowned. He wanted to talk, but Berliner was laughing, Paul was brimming over, and I also wanted to talk. Then Paul was talking, pushing himself before us, lunging and tumbling into what happened to him, offering it to Berliner.

“I know what you mean, Solly. A woman likes you. By contrast, you know Sheila doesn’t. That also happened to me. It was the same thing, but the other way around. I mean I liked a certain woman. What happened is my wife’s father died and she had to go to the funeral in Idaho. She’d be gone for two weeks. Two weeks is long. After a couple of days, I got lonely. I couldn’t sleep, eat, nothing. I wanted her to come home. I phoned her and said I didn’t like being alone. She said she wasn’t in Idaho having fun. Her family was fighting over the estate. She was the only one who could be fair, the only one they trusted. She had to stay longer and that’s that. Same day my boss tells me about this party. It’s a fund raiser for a politician. Somebody from our firm has to be at the party, like to show the politician we are behind him. I say okay, I’ll go. At the party I’m standing around trying to enjoy myself, but I don’t know anybody. I felt more and more lonely. I miss my wife. Then this woman who works for the politician comes up to me and starts talking. She doesn’t say it, but I could tell she picked me out because I looked the way she felt. She tells me she is looking for a house. I’m listening to her and I’m beginning to feel relieved. Somebody is talking to me. I don’t want her to go away. Maybe I acted more interested than I was, but soon she’s telling me that she lived with a man for years, with him and her two kids, but now they are breaking up and she needs her own house. First time I ever saw the woman and she tells me this. But it’s a party. You tell a stranger what you wouldn’t always tell a friend. After a while, I begin to get really interested. Hopeful, maybe. My wife was gone almost a week by then. I didn’t even know when she was coming back. She kept saying there was another legal complication, another delay. So here I am at a party. The woman is telling me she looks for a house every day and can’t find one. Always too expensive, or the neighborhood is wrong, or something is the matter with the house. This has been going on for a year now. She’s still living with the man. He works nights, a short-order cook, but lately he’s been out of work and they’re sleeping in the same bed, and they hardly talk. Never touch. Her name is Molly. She’s about thirty, thirty-five. Attractive. Maybe a little scrawny, a little tight and nervous. I could see she has problems. She’s wearing a yellow dress and she has a yellow ribbon in her hair. Too bright. And her eyes are too big. She’s talking like the thing with the house and man was happening to somebody but not her exactly. I got more interested and I was a little sorry for her. She has a nice figure, but she’s wearing too much yellow, and her eyes look exploded, like she’s going crazy searching for what flew away. Then I said I didn’t believe she wanted to move out. She would have found a house if she wanted to move out. ‘Why wouldn’t I want to move out?’ she says, very surprised, like she never thought of that. I told her it was obvious. She loves the man. She laughed. She says, ‘If anything, he loves me.’ She woke up one night, she says, and found him beating her. In her sleep, he jumped on her, crying like a kid and beating her. Then she asks me to talk about myself, but what was I going to say after that? My wife is out of town? I’m lonely? In no time we’re talking about her again. I wasn’t hopeful anymore. I never played around anyway. I was lonely, but playing around is not my style. A woman talks to me at a party. What is that supposed to mean? She loves me? I mean, I liked her. Maybe I wanted to go to bed with her, but she was too complicated. She can’t find a house because a guy is beating her up in her sleep. Next thing, she’d be telling me about her spinal tap, her year in the rubber room. Then the party is starting to end. She offers me a ride. I say my car is parked two blocks away. She says she owes me for listening to her. Like it’s funny. Like she’s being funny to make up for the bad shit she told me. She says I was a nice guy, I did her a favor listening, and now I have to let her give me a ride to my car. I laugh and tell her all right and we walk out together. We walk and we walk, and every couple of blocks she has to stop, look around, try to think. She can’t remember where she parked her car. ‘I’m so embarrassed,’ she says. An hour later, when we walked about a mile, I’m beginning to understand why that guy beats her up. I’m beginning to think she doesn’t even have a car, when she spots it. ‘Gloria!’ she says. ‘You were hiding from me, weren’t you. Bad car. Bad Gloria.’ It’s an old Buick. Front seat like a couch. We get in. I don’t show her I’m a little disgusted. I’m still being a nice guy, but now I really need a ride. I’m waiting. I notice she isn’t moving. I look at her. She is staring at me like she was waiting for me to look at her. She says, ‘Thanks.’ I say, ‘For what?’ She says, ‘You’re a good person.’ I say, ‘For listening to you? It was nothing. I enjoyed it.’ She says, ‘No, it was not nothing. It was really kind of you.’ I say, ‘You’re welcome, but it was nothing.’ She says, ‘No. Don’t say that. It was wonderful of you. I want to say thanks. I’m grateful to you, Bill.’ I say, ‘Paul.’ Her face twists. She looks frightened. ‘Forgive me,’ she says, ‘I’m so sorry I called you Bill.’ I say, ‘Paul sounds like Bill. Almost the same name. Anybody could make that mistake and who cares? Call me Bill, call me Shithead, if you want.’ She starts to cry. ‘I hurt you,’ she says, ‘didn’t I? How could I have done that.’ Man, I made a little joke. But she doesn’t see it as a joke. I put my hand on her leg. Like to show her everything is okay. I just gave her a friendly touch. Soon as she feels my hand, she comes sliding across the seat to me. What I wanted, right? I mean it is, but it isn’t. Not like this. Too weird, but we’re into heavy petting, like high-school kids. Then we’re trying to do the whole works in the front seat. My head is banging against the steering wheel and it’s getting very hot in the car, but once you get started there is no going back. I was excited by the idea, maybe, not the thing. The thing didn’t work, anyway. It was over in three minutes. I felt terrible. She looks happy. She was shining. You’d have thought we had a real good time. She says, ‘Let’s get something to eat. Let’s have dinner or something.’ She is shining, full of energy, ready to start the evening. I was sitting there with my pants around my ankles. My dick looks crushed. Like somebody stepped on it. She sees I don’t feel happy and she says, ‘Next time it will be better.’ I told her I had to go home now, but I would phone her. She says, ‘You promise to phone me? Will you phone tomorrow?’ I said I would, I promise. She drove me to my car. The next day, like I promised, I phoned her. Not to make a date, but I promised so I phoned. Right away she says, ‘Why don’t you come over to my place.’ Instead of saying no, I say, ‘What about your friend, the guy you live with?’ She says, ‘I do what I want. The man doesn’t decide who I see or don’t see.’ I said, ‘All right. I’ll come over.’ She tells me she lives in Oakland, gives me directions. Her voice is shining. I could almost see her, the way she looked in the car. I remembered what she said about the next time. I’m excited, but on my way over to her house I had second thoughts. This was stupid. I didn’t want to do this. She is attractive and everything, but I’m driving along, getting close to her place, and I ask myself, ‘Do you want to do this?’ The answer is no. The thing in her car was not good. There was also the man. She called him ‘the man.’ What was I doing getting mixed up with them? I didn’t like the idea of the man one bit. I turned around, started driving back, thinking I would go to a movie. Go to sleep. Phone my wife and tell her she has to come home no matter what. Two minutes later I turn around again, thinking this is more stupid. I said I would go to her place and I ought to go. Nothing to worry about. It’s simple. A little companionship. I’d have a good time. Everybody does it. I didn’t do it, but why not? Was something wrong with me? I could do it. So what if I didn’t want to do it? That was no fucking reason not to do it. I drove to her house mad at myself, but like feeling definite. I go stomping up the steps to her door. I ring the bell. I’m thinking she will open the door wearing a nightgown, shining at me. We will embrace and do it. Both of us will feel joy. I don’t know what her living room looks like, but I’m imagining we will do it there, on the floor. My heart is beating so strong that my shirt is jumping. I can hardly breathe. The door opens and I almost shit in my pants. It’s the man. The porch light is hitting him. I see everything. He’s got a broomstick head with nose holes, but no nose and no chin. His neck comes to his lower lip. He is wearing thick glasses, so thick it’s like they make him blind. He says, ‘You must be Paul.’ I hear kids laughing and music from a TV set. His voice is warm and friendly. He’s wearing an apron and carrying a wooden ladle, as if he’s in the middle of cooking dinner. A cigarette is in the other hand. He takes a drag, looking at me through his goggles, and his lower lip comes about to the middle of the cigarette. His knuckles get sticky with spit. He says, ‘Molly went to buy some whiskey, I think. I heard her tell the kids that Paul is coming over. You’re welcome to come inside and wait.’ I said, ‘Oh, thank you. Please tell her I’ll be right back.’ Like I rang the doorbell to say I would be right back. When I get to my car I am so relieved that I think I will sit here, in my car, with the windows rolled up and the doors locked, for the rest of my life. I will never move again. I could understand why she couldn’t find a house. I couldn’t explain it. I could understand. Don’t ask me to explain. I mean the man is wearing an apron. He has no nose. I don’t even want to think about it. I saw her coming up the street hugging a grocery bag, hurrying, almost running. I slunk down. She went by without seeing me. I don’t remember starting my car, but I got home in about five minutes. I must have done fifty on College Avenue. I didn’t notice nothing.”