Leonard Michaels - The Men's Club

“Yeah. Where did you have it cut? San Francisco?”

“A woman friend cut it for me.”

“Good job. What do you call it — layered, right? Sort of a windblown look. Like a beach. Windy beach. Your friend knows what she’s doing. My client paid eighty bucks to get her hair cut, then talked about it with me. Another fifty bucks. Figure a hundred and thirty bucks for a haircut, plus going deaf. She could hear the phone ring, but no voices. Went deaf to voices. Told me people were screaming at her — hus — band, kids, even the clerks in the supermarket. I had to laugh. Not in front of her, naturally. She was too freaked out. I went to the toilet, shut the door. I laughed and laughed.”

I supposed it was a funny story, but didn’t laugh. Neither did anyone else. Kramer, suddenly an impetuous talker, was deaf to himself. Nancy moved before he finished, stepping through the confusion of the dining-room floor. She was wearing sandals. Pretty feet. I imagined her ankles and legs were also pretty and I began to look for imperfections. Do women look at each other this way? It felt indecent, in these circumstances, but I couldn’t not do it. If she were perfect, I’d feel depressed. At the dish cabinet, she stopped, looked at the gashes down one side, touched them lightly with her fingertips.

“Oh, I’ll get rid of those marks,” said Kramer very confidently, almost boasting. She wasn’t listening. He shut up and watched her. She pushed the splintered door, entered the kitchen. We heard the refrigerator seal breaking with a gasp. After a few seconds, the door shut. “You must have been hungry,” she said. Her voice, coming from the kitchen, had nothing special in it beyond this observation.

“Yeah,” said Kramer, echoing her tone, “we were starving. I’ll replace the food tomorrow. I’ll have it catered — chicken, salmon, everything. What time is your women’s group coming over?”

He faced the kitchen door, hands on his hips. He looked ready. Weight evenly distributed, head up, glance fixed on the door. Ready to listen, answer, act. The door opened. Nancy reentered the dining room. “I feel invaded.”

“Right,” said Kramer, as if she’d answered his question precisely. “I hear you and I want to think about what you’re saying. Invaded. What do you feel about that?”

Berliner giggled. “Why don’t you put it on tape?”

Kramer glanced at him as if the idea were considerable.

“Put it on tape,” said Nancy. “Maybe you’ll want to play it back later while you’re thinking about it.”

Kramer nodded. “You mean it would like tell me something about our relationship?” He was ready for that, too. Very agreeable. Ready to learn. It came to me that, for Kramer, life was forever open to new understandings. Amid the destruction of his dining room, he was committed to no particular interpretation of anything.

“All this is telling me something about our relationship,” she said.

“Sure, baby. That’s what we’ve been talking about the whole night. Relationships.”

“Hi, Nancy,” said Cavanaugh.

“Hi, Cavanaugh.”

We’d remained where she found us, Kramer closest to her, at the edge of the spill, the toppled dining-room table approximately between them, slightly to her right.

“Let’s go sit in the living room,” said Kramer. “I’ll turn on the machine. You say what you feel.”

She nodded the way he did. “The feeling machine.”

Kramer smiled. She didn’t.

“I can say what I feel without the machine, but I feel — even saying this — you might feel I’m cutting your balls off. I sense negative vibes. You feel I’m like ruining your party, don’t you?”

“I don’t know about that. But you aren’t responsible for my feelings. We have discussed this, right? I mean I could feel what I feel and you could feel—”

“Right, right, right. I understand. I appreciate your feelings about your freedom and being a creative person.”

“And I appreciate how you, like, want to express yourself.”

“But you feel I don’t have to do it this minute. I could express myself later.”

“It could be later,” said Kramer, generosity in his voice, accepting her idea as if he were offering her something.

“I mean I understand how it could be later. That’s cool.” She nodded again in his manner as she spoke, same generous ingratiating tone as his. “Sure, it could be later. We could sit down later. Talk.”

They looked at each other, nodding, birdlike, a ritual dance of species recognition. The rest of us looked at them. Their unanimity made us seem disorganized and irrelevant: marginal men, incidental scribbles. Even the giant Cavanaugh looked trivial compared to them. Yet I wondered if, in a room full of men and women, I could have guessed Kramer was married to this woman. Probably not. I expect physical similarities. Not the familiar fat of conjugal loneliness or the clumsy compulsive first person plural, but something in the original beings, their racial teleology, similarities in hair, eyes, shape of lip and foot. It’s as if, in couples, I expect cows or gorillas. Never the unpredictable discrepancies of a human man and woman. No, I couldn’t have guessed these two were married. He had luxuriously fashioned black hair; and his arms, tattooed in blue and red, seemed to spring from his soul. She was simple, immediately present. No costume instinct, plainly pretty in color and bone; nothing to hide or advertise. He was dark, she light. His expression was sensuous, a mix of menace and self-love, qualified by his eye problem, the way he blinked occasionally to focus. Her expression was neutral, consistent, what you sometimes see in good-looking women — facial restraint, close to deadness, as if they fear their effect on others. They looked chemically antithetical. Not right. All wrong. But love is blind, unreasonable — forget plausible — and marriages are made in heaven. Kramer was insanely reasonable now. “Yeah, we could sit down, have a cup of coffee, talk. In the morning, like.”

“It is the morning.”

This was sharp contradiction, or qualification. Kramer assimilated it quickly. “Right,” he said, cocking his head, snapping his fingers, then back to hands on hips. Ready once more. I was on his side, though it was hard to root for him; something in his will to accommodate was contemptible. Besides, she was prettier; perhaps smarter, but I couldn’t tell about that because she had a certain moral advantage, given the circumstances. The way her blouse continued trembling also affected my sympathies, making pity and sadism masturbate each other, making me like her, and, even without better evidence than I had, making me wonder if Kramer deserved this woman. She said, “What you are saying is that we could wait until the sun comes up. Is that, like, what you mean?”

I heard faint pressure on the “like” and realized, for the first time, she was imitating Kramer. A form of praise, imitation works also for hate. Nothing substantially personal had been said, yet hearing even this was a privileged, if awkward, intimacy. Some couples relish public battle; these two had style; manners; almost Japanese in their gracious distance.

“Yeah,” said Kramer, “that’s what I mean. We could wait till the sun comes up. But I don’t want to do some oppressive fascist number on you. I mean if you would like to talk now, I could dig it.”

“But you would like to talk when the sun comes up. That’s fine with me. I like to talk when the sun comes up. It’s more creative.”

Kramer thought for a second, then said, “Yeah,” nodding. She joined him, both nodding, as if toward a truth beyond themselves, extremely general and creative. Then she turned, went into the kitchen, disappeared, reappeared, ruined door flying with her passing through it toward Kramer, who stood hands on hips, nodding, nodding, watching her come swiftly to him, hands above her head.