Leonard Michaels - The Men's Club

“Praise the Lord!” screamed Canterbury.

He smiled as if he intended more, but — screaming — he’d shocked himself, lost the necessary presence of mind. He quit. He was still. Blond clean pale stiff. A smile in a floating head. Holiday colors below.

I wondered if Canterbury, mildly epileptic perhaps, had had a seizure. A long moment passed. Everyone staring at him. I was reminded of a student, a boy who sat in a corner in back of the room, saying nothing for weeks, and then, last day of class, cried out, got everyone’s attention, and was unintelligible. Like Canterbury, he was there, but he wasn’t here. One needs a sense of the person, sometimes, to understand even his simplest utterance. We don’t hear words; we hear ourselves, personally, speaking words. All night he’d said virtually nothing. He wanted to be a zero, but I had to see him, at least peripherally, every time I looked up. He was there, across the table, practicing invisibility. Now he’d burst with exasperation; abrupt protrusion of inner life. Under the pressure of our staring, he tipped back in his chair, making a picture of sublime ease, and said, “Ignore me.”

But he was strained, not easy. Meanings controlled by no intention drifted from his features. The smile lay in his lips like a feeling he didn’t want to have. Something precious, however. Very paradoxical. I wondered if he was gay, literally thinking the word. It brought delirious evanescence to mind, high thin spirits. Not much like Canterbury, but maybe he was gay in the sense of grim. I had gay friends at the university who were dismal. No reason to think any of this, or anything so personal to Canterbury. That’s why I thought it. He wasn’t of this company. He’d eaten like the rest of us and sat there listening, but produced no credentials.

“What are you talking about?” said Cavanaugh to be solicitous, but his size and the direct thrust of the question made him intimidating.

Insane, epileptic, gay, smiling, pale, Canterbury said, “I don’t know.”

He crossed and uncrossed his legs. A display of restless irrelevance, as if to say, Don’t look at me, I’m not here, but look at me, I’m here thrashing in my chair, tipped way back, utterly relaxed. He looked precarious. I was uneasy. When it happened, I squealed like a girl.

Canterbury’s hands were catching, slapping, losing the edge of the table as he fell back slowly, inevitably, then fast, arms flailing. There was a crash of wood and bones. I no longer saw him.

Had Berliner fallen, there would have been a festival of jeering and laughter. For Canterbury there was exquisite silence. He righted his chair. He sat in it again. Correctly erect, ready to resume, the smile in his face once more as though the event had already disappeared from human history. Kramer, with a judicious tone, said, “In my opinion, Harold is telling us to shut up.”

He meant no joke. The remark came from his professional self, one who knew the reasons of things. Canterbury looked at Kramer fully and coldly, daring him to interpret the fall. Kramer didn’t, but he looked back knowingly. He seemed to resonate implications. Canterbury took them like a stain. His ears reddened. Hairs, pressed by blood, radiated along the rims. A fine white contrasting haze. Even across the table from him, I could see it. He was furious.

“I dislike being analyzed. I resent it, Kramer. I’m not your patient or whatever you call them — clients?” Further objections collected, jammed in his neck. “I said to ignore me. Ignore me.”

Kramer, hastening to comply, spoke softly. “Sure, man. Not everyone who hears our stories would like them. I wasn’t making a judgment. I understand. You don’t have to like the stories.”

“Thanks. I’ve been sitting here afraid I had to like them.”

There had been other ironical remarks. This had icy force. Mean. Bitchy. Kramer blinked, rubbed his wandering eye, and settled back, watching Canterbury. He too now wanted to be ignored, but Canterbury said, “Before you produce the entire philosophy of your psycho-science, let me say the stories are obscene. Oh, really, what difference does that make? The population of America is large. Who cares what anyone says about anyone else? No personal information is so peculiar that it doesn’t apply to millions. You’d be out of business if things were otherwise. Isn’t that true? An individual, a real individual with dignity, with self-respect, couldn’t go to a therapist, could he? You see nothing but a stream of whining, sniveling creeps, don’t you?”

“I never thought of my clients that way. Some are very individual. You should hear the shit they tell me. If that isn’t individual, I don’t know what is. Mainly, I do marriage and family counseling. Husbands and wives together. Sometimes with kids. I also see people alone. I don’t know what you mean by individuals.”

“Terry knows. He’s a doctor. He knows he can talk all night about Mango and he isn’t describing her any more than a million other women. She did what he wanted for prescriptions. She raised rabbits. So what? She’ll be on TV tomorrow. She’s nobody. She doesn’t exist.”

“Doesn’t exist?” Terry poked his ribs under his right arm with his fork. “She has a supernumerary nipple. Here. How’s that for peculiar?”

Canterbury’s smile brightened with contempt. “Really? How about her teeth? Normal number?”

“Yes. Also a five-year-old son who lives with her ex-husband, a cripple. He was injured doing construction work. The compensation payments bought the house in Martinez. Felicia is nobody? I helped fill out her income-tax forms. At her kitchen table. Blue and white oilcloth, faded, cracked like old skin. Sticky. She exists. She sewed a button onto my jacket sleeve. For months I carried that button in my pocket. If she doesn’t exist, how do you account for that button? I wouldn’t have sewn it on myself. If I asked Nicki to do it, she’d have sewn it between my eyes.”

At “eyes” Canterbury rolled his eyes, as if assaulted by moral idiocy.

“Oh, it’s finally a matter of taste. This sort of talk makes me feel soiled. Lonely. I know I’ve been sitting here listening. I suppose I have a debt to the club. I should tell a story, too, or at least slander someone. But stories don’t happen to me. I have an ordinary life. I don’t know gorgeous Latinos who raise rabbits. Great loss for me, I’m sure. I should have gone home. I don’t belong in this club.”

Cavanaugh loomed at his end of the table, mountainous, immobilized. Paul rolled no marijuana. Berliner muttered something, denied it, sighed. Terry was bogged in his densities. He’d done his best and failed. Kramer, sunk within his darkness, said, “People go to therapists because they have to. They’re in pain.” He’d been dropped minutes ago, bleeding heavily.

“Yes, get rid of their pain,” said Canterbury. “Throw it out. See what you’re saying? No respect for their own pain. Get rid of their pain and everything else goes with it. My wife had six years of psychoanalysis. I know what I’m talking about. She took every stick of furniture. I came home one night to a hollow house. She left a note saying, ‘Dear, you can keep the furniture. I’ve taken some of the duplicates.’ There was nothing. Not even a dish towel. I paid for six years of psychoanalysis for her.”

His wife?

I said, “Canterbury, you want to go home, but you don’t go home. You want to be ignored, but you fall out of your chair.”

“I have feelings. You guys sound like a bunch of homos.”

Berliner grabbed me around the neck, yanked me toward him, kissed my cheek.

“Thanks, shmuck,” I said, wiping my cheek with the back of my hand. Now I understood Canterbury. He wasn’t gay. He was a critic, a perfect person. Kramer, clinging still to his therapeutic manner, fraught with reasonableness, said, “Nobody has an ordinary life, Harold. Not even you. It’s not common for somebody’s wife to disappear with all the furniture.”