Leonard Michaels: The Men's Club

“The end.”

“Cavanaugh,” said Paul, “I’ve known you for years. How come you never told me that story?”

“Maybe I’m not sure it happened.”

“You did go back to the grocery?”

“So what?”

I said, “Paul means, if you looked for her, it happened.”

“I still look. When Sarah sends me out to do the shopping, she doesn’t know the risk she’s taking.”

“Cavanaugh,” I said, “do you think you ever passed her in the street and she recognized you but you didn’t recognize her? That happened to me once. A woman stopped me and said, ‘Hello,’ and when I stood there staring like a fool, she turned and walked away. She’d recognized me.”

“Anybody would recognize Cavanaugh,” said Kramer, “from his picture in the papers.”

“Hey,” said Berliner, “I have an idea. We can all look for her. What do you say?”

Paul said, “Shut up, man.”

“Why is everyone telling me to shut up? I drove here from San Jose and everyone tells me to shut up.” Berliner sighed in a philosophical way. He’d seen into the nature of life. “Looking for Cavanaugh’s woman. To me it’s a good idea. Hey, man, I have a better idea. Cavanaugh, take a quick look through Kramer’s snapshots.”

“She wasn’t one of them. She was a queen.”

“Queen what?” shouted Kramer. “My women have names. What did you call her? You call her Queen?”

“I’m sorry, Kramer. Take it easy. He thinks I crapped on his harem.”

I said, “Let me talk. I want to tell a love story.”

“Great,” said Berliner. “Everybody shut up. Go, man. Sing the blues.”

“You don’t want to hear my story? I listened to yours, Berliner.”

“Yes he does,” said Kramer. “Let him talk, Solly.”

“I didn’t try to stop him.”

Cavanaugh said, “Just begin.”

“Yeah,” said Berliner, grinning, brilliant and stiff with teeth.

“So far,” I said, “I’ve heard three stories about one thing. Cavanaugh calls it love. I call it stories about the other woman. By which I mean the one who is not the wife. To you guys, only the other woman is interesting. If there weren’t first a wife, there couldn’t be the other woman. Especially you, Berliner. Moaning, just moaning, your wife is only your wife. Moaning with love, she’s the other woman. And Kramer with his snapshots. Look at them. He spent his life trying to photograph the other woman, but every time he snapped a picture it was like getting married. Like eliminating another woman from the possibility of being the other woman. And Cavanaugh, why can’t he find his woman? Because if he finds her she won’t be the other woman anymore. This way he protects his marriage. Every time he goes to the grocery store and doesn’t see the other woman, which is every single time, his marriage is stronger.”

Cavanaugh, frowning at me, said, “What are you trying to tell us? What’s all this about the other woman? Why don’t you say it, man?”

“I am saying it.”

Kramer then said, “You’re trying to tell us you love your wife. You think I don’t love mine? You think Solly doesn’t love his wife?”

Berliner cried, “If that’s all you think, you’re right. I hate my wife.”

“Tell your story,” said Cavanaugh. “Enough philosophy.”

“I don’t know if I can tell it. I never told it before. It’s about a woman who was my friend in high school and college. Her name is Marilyn. We practically grew up together. She lives in Chicago now. She’s a violinist in a symphony orchestra. I spent more time with her than any other woman except maybe my mother. She wasn’t like a sister. She was like a friend, a very close friend. I couldn’t have had such a friendship with a man. We’d go out together and if I brought her home late I’d stay over at her place, in the same bed. Nothing sexual. Between us it would have been a crime. We would fight plenty, say terrible things to each other, but we were close. She phoned me every day and we stayed on the phone for an hour. We went to parties together when neither of us had a date. Showing up with her increased my chances of meeting some girl. It gave me a kind of power, walking in with Marilyn, free to pick up somebody else. She had the same power. We never analyzed our relationship, but we joked about what other people thought. My mother would answer the phone and if she heard Marilyn’s voice she’d say, ‘It’s your future wife.’ But she worried about us. She warned me that any woman I was serious about would object to Marilyn. Or she’d say it wasn’t nice, me and Marilyn so thick with each other, because I was ruining her chances of meeting a man. That wasn’t true. Marilyn had plenty of affairs. All of them ended badly, but I had nothing to do with that. One of her men scissored her dresses into rags. Another flung her Siamese cat out the window. She always found some guy who was well educated, had pleasant manners, and turned out to be a brute. She suffered, but nothing destroyed her. She had her violin. She also had me. Once, when I was out of a job and no longer living at home with my mother, she loaned me money and let me stay at her place for weeks. I was trying to decide what to do — get another job, go back to school — and Marilyn didn’t urge me to hurry. I didn’t even have to ask her if I could stay at her place. I just appeared with my bags. One night she came home with a friend, a girl who looked something like her. Curly brown hair, blue eyes, and beautiful skin, faintly olive-colored. They were also the same size. Before dinner was over, Marilyn remembered something important she had to do. She excused herself and went to a movie. Her friend and I were alone in the apartment. It was glorious. A few days later, talking to Marilyn about this and that, I mentioned her friend. Marilyn said she didn’t want to hear about her. That friendship was over and it was something she couldn’t discuss. Furthermore, she said, I had acted badly that night at dinner, driving her out of her own apartment. I said, ‘I thought you left as a favor to me. I thought you did it deliberately.’ She said she did do it deliberately, but only because I made it extremely obvious that I wanted her to get out. Now I began to feel angry. I told her she didn’t have to leave her own apartment for my sake and it was rotten of her to make me feel guilty about it after I’d started having very good feelings about her friend. I said this thinking it would prevent an argument; change everything. Marilyn would laugh; give me a hug. Instead, she lights a cigarette and begins smoking with quick half-drags, flicking ashes all over her couch. Then she says, ‘Why don’t you say that you consider me physically disgusting and you always have.’ This was my old friend Marilyn speaking, but it seemed like science fiction. It looked like her. It sounded like her. It was her, but it wasn’t. Some weird mongoose had seized her soul. Then she starts telling me about what is inside my head, things she has always known though I tried to hide them from her. Her voice is bitter and nasty. She says she knows I can’t stand her breasts and the birthmark on her neck sickens me. I said, ‘What birthmark?’ She says, ‘Who are you trying to kid? I’ve seen you looking at it a thousand times when you thought I didn’t notice.’ I sat down beside her on the couch. She says, ‘Get away from me, you pig.’ I felt confused. Ashamed and frightened at the same time. Then she jumps off the couch and strides out of the room. I hear her slamming around in the toilet, bottles toppling out of her medicine cabinet into the sink. Smashing. I said, ‘Marilyn, are you all right?’ No answer. Finally, she comes out wearing a bathrobe with nothing underneath and the robe is open. But she is standing there as if nothing has changed since she left the room, and she talks to me again in the same nasty voice. She sneers and accuses me of things I couldn’t have imagined, let alone thought about her, as she says I did, every day, all the time, pretending I was her friend. Suddenly I’m full of a new feeling. Not what a normal person would call sexual feeling, but what does a penis know. It isn’t a connoisseur of normal sex. Besides, I was a lot younger, still mystified by my own chemicals. I leap off the couch and grab her. No, I find myself leaping, grabbing her, and she’s twisting, trying to hit me, really fighting. She’s seriously trying to hurt me, but there’s no screaming or cursing, there’s only the two of us breathing and sweating, and then she begins to collapse, to slide toward the floor. Next thing I’m on top of her. I’m wearing my clothes, she’s lying on her open robe. It’s supernaturally exciting. Both of us are shivering and wild. We fell asleep like that and we slept at least an hour. I woke when I felt her moving. The lights were on. We were looking at each other. She says, ‘This is very discouraging.’ Then she went to her bedroom and shut the door. I got up and followed her and knocked at the door. She opens it and lets me kiss her. Then she shut the door again. I went to sleep in the living room, and left early the next morning. Six months later she wrote me a letter at my mother’s address, telling me about her new job in Chicago and giving me her phone number. I phoned. After we talked for a while, she asked about her friend. I told her it was finished between her friend and me. I was seeing somebody else. She changed the subject. Every few months I get a letter from her. I write to her also. Someday, if I happen to be in Chicago, I’ll visit her.”