Leonard Michaels: The Men's Club

His voice flooded with accommodation. “We had a weekend in the mountains with another couple. A ski cabin near Lake Tahoe. The first night we got a little drunk after dinner and somebody — maybe me — yeah, yeah, me — I said let’s trade partners. It was my own idea, right? So we traded. It was okay. It wasn’t the first time we did it. But then I heard my wife moaning. It was a small cabin. And that was okay, but she was not just moaning. You know what I mean? She was moaning with love.”

“Love?” said Kramer.

“Yeah. Moaning with love. She was overdoing it, you know what I mean. She was doing love. I wanted to kill her.”

Cavanaugh reached over and squeezed Berliner’s arm. Berliner was still smiling, the green eyes searching our faces for the meaning of what he’d said. “Is that what you wanted to hear, Harold?”

“Did it ruin your weekend?”

“It was horrible, man. I lost my erection.”

Berliner began screeing again and I heard myself doing it, too, like him, making that creepy sound.

“It was horrible, horrible. I was ashamed. I ran out of the cabin and sat on a rock. My wife started calling through the door, ‘Solly, Solly, Solly Berliner.’ Then she came outside, laughing, and found me. I showed her what she had done to me. She said it wasn’t her fault. She said it was my idea. I hit her and said that was my idea, too. She started crying. Soon as she started crying, my erection came back.”

Kramer said, “What happened next?”

“But you were talking, Kramer,” I said. “You know what happened next. Next she hit him and they made it together. It’s a cliché. You should finish telling your story. You should have a full turn.”

Berliner, incoherent with excitement, shouted, “How the hell do you know? I’m telling what happened to me, me, me.”

“All right, all right. What happened next?”

“She hit me and we made it together.”

Cavanaugh, with two fists, hammered the rug until everyone quieted. Then he said, “Look at Kramer.” Kramer was slumped forward, dark face hanging, glancing vaguely back at Cavanaugh.

“Let’s let him alone,” said Cavanaugh. Kramer grinned and sat up, but he didn’t protest. Cavanaugh continued, “Maybe Kramer will want to say more later. I’d like to hear about the childhood he didn’t have, but I think we’re talking about love tonight. I’ll tell you guys a love story. Okay?”

I said, “Kramer tells us he made it with six hundred women. Berliner says he traded his wife, then beat her up and had an erection. You call that love?”

Cavanaugh gave me a flat look, as if I’d become strange to him.

“Why not?”

“Oh, God.”

“Hey, man, what do you want to hear about? Toothpaste and deodorants?”

“You’re right, Cavanaugh. I give up. I bet your story is about how you made it with ten thousand high-school cheerleaders.”

Cavanaugh stared at the place in the rug he had just hammered. The big body was immobilized, the whole man getting things in order, remembering.

“About three months after we got married, my second wife and I started having arguments. Bad scenes. We would go to bed hating each other. There were months with no sex. I didn’t know who was more miserable. I was making a lot of money playing ball and I was playing good. It should have been good for us altogether. The marriage should have been fine. In the middle of a game with the crowd screaming, I’d think this was no fantastic deal, because I had no love at home. Soon there was nothing in my body but anger. I got into fights with my own teammates. I couldn’t shave without slicing my face. I was smoking cigarettes. I had something against my body and wanted to hurt it. When I told Sarah I was moving out, she said, ‘Great.’ She wanted to live alone. I moved out and stayed with a friend until I found an apartment. One day in the grocery store, I was throwing every kind of thing into my shopping cart. I was making sure nothing I needed would show up later as not being there. And this woman, I notice, is pushing her cart behind me, up and down the aisles, giggling. I knew she was giggling at me. When I got to the cashier she is behind me in line, still giggling, and then she says, very sweet and tickled, ‘You must have a station wagon out there in the parking lot.’ I said, ‘I have a pickup truck. Do you want a ride?’ A man buying so much food, she figured, has a family. Safe to ask for a ride. She didn’t have a car. I gave her a ride and carried her groceries upstairs to her apartment. A little boy was sitting on the floor watching TV. She introduced us and offered me a drink and we sat in another room talking. The boy took care of himself. Like in Kramer’s story. He cooked dinner for himself. He gave himself a bath. Then went to bed. But his mother wasn’t depressed like Kramer’s. She laughed and teased me and asked a lot of questions. I talked about myself for five or six hours. We ate dinner around midnight, and then, at four in the morning, I woke up in her bed, thinking about my ton of groceries rotting in the pickup. But that wasn’t what woke me. What woke me was the feeling I wanted to go back to my place. I hadn’t left one woman to sleep with another. I mean I hadn’t left my wife to do that. I wanted to go back to my own apartment, my own bed. I didn’t know what I was doing in this woman’s bed. I got up and dressed and left. As I was about to drive away she comes running to the window of my pickup, naked. ‘Where are you going at this hour?’ I said I wanted to go home. She says, ‘Okay, I’ll come with you.’ I told her no and said I would phone her. She said okay and smiled and said good night. She was like that little boy. Or he was like her. Easy. Okay, okay, good night. I didn’t think I would phone her. Now this is my story. I woke up the next afternoon. I liked it, waking alone, but I felt something strange. I wanted something. Then I remembered the woman and I knew what I wanted. I wanted to phone her. So I went to the phone and I realized I didn’t know her number. I didn’t even know her name. Well, I showered, got dressed, and stopped thinking about her. I went out for something. I didn’t know what. I had everything I needed in the apartment. But I started driving and right away I was driving back to the grocery store, as if the pickup had a mind of its own. I was just holding the wheel. I didn’t get farther than the grocery store, because I didn’t remember where she lived. I remembered leaving the store with her, driving toward the bay, and that’s all. She said, ‘Turn right, turn left, go straight,’ but I never noticed street names or anything. Now I wanted to see that woman more and more. The next day I went back to the grocery and hung around the parking lot. I did that every day for a week, at different times. I thought I remembered how she looked talking to me through the window of my pickup, how she smiled and said okay. I wanted to see her again badly. But I wasn’t sure I could recognize her in the street. She was wearing gold loop earrings, jeans, and sandals. What if she came along in a skirt and heels? Anyhow, I never saw her again.”

Cavanaugh stopped. It was obvious he had no more to say, but Kramer said, “Is that your story?”

“Yes.” Cavanaugh leaned back, watching us.

“That’s your love story?” I asked.

“Right. I fell in love with a woman I couldn’t find the next day. She might live around the corner.”

“You still love her?” asked Paul, tremendous delicacy in his voice, the slight small body poised, full of tenderness and tension.

Cavanaugh smiled at him with melancholy eyes. The whole expression of his great face and body suggested that he’d been humbled by fate.

“That can’t be it,” said Paul. “That can’t be the end.”