Leonard Michaels - The Men's Club

“I played ball for years. No tendonitis, no ruptures, no breaks, no sprains — and lately I have trouble with sleep. Put my head on the pillow and black out. I don’t go to sleep. I faint.”

Cavanaugh — superb in speed and strength, adored by millions — was sorry for himself. Paul and Berliner had missed the point. Their bodies gave them trouble, but they were normal.

“Who knows when he falls asleep?” said Berliner, surprised, but speaking softly; very solicitous. “If I’m falling asleep and I think, ‘I’m falling asleep,’ I wake up.”

“Right, man. But for me the little trip, the nice couple of minutes between the pillow and nothing, is gone. Middle of the night — same way I blacked out — I wake up. I’m hungry. I have to go to the bathroom. I want one of Sarah’s cigarettes. I want to drink some beers, get laid, look for a fight. This can be two in the morning. I go stomping from room to room, slamming doors, turning on lights. I’m mad. I want to go outside, shake the trees, wake the birds.”

“I’ll give you some Valium,” said Kramer.

“I don’t take pills. I’m a country boy. I get dressed and drive to Oakland or San Francisco, or I head for the San Rafael Bridge, pushing eighty, ninety. I’m humming like a dynamo, faster than my pickup. I’m going, going hot dog, and I don’t know where I’m going. Sometimes I drive to the park, leave the pickup near the entrance, and run.”

“Cold,” I said.

“Yeah, cold,” said Paul, close behind me.

“It’s cold. Also dark. The trail is dim even in the moonlight. But I’ve run it so much I could run it blind. Deer standing in the meadows don’t look at me anymore. I once passed a doe who was defecating and she went right on, not even twitching an ear. As if I was irrelevant. I run so long sometimes I see colors begin, hear birds chirping in the fog.”

I looked beyond Cavanaugh to the dining-room wall. Red velvety paper, a bloody sheen giving pressure to the whole room, walls closing in, pulsing. Too sensational. Not a room in which to try to think, but I wanted to say something. “What do you do then?”

Paul muttered the same question. It seemed we asked.

“I shower and dress for work. Slowly. I feel confused. I worry. Which tie to wear? Which shirt? Once I came back, my body screaming like it was permanently awake. I took a long shower and got back into bed. I had to be able to sleep. I’d run fifteen miles. Nothing happened. Sarah was curled up like a fist around an egg. Hot with sleep, gone away, sleeping with sleep. Not me. I had nothing. I wasn’t consistent with my body.”

“Oh, man,” said Berliner, as if he couldn’t bear another word. “You should have balled her. When I can’t sleep, I ball Sheila and konk right out.”

“I started touching her. Just for company. I slid my hand along her leg and, after a while, I wanted more. I pulled her under me. She was asleep. I had an idea I could do it without waking her. I had her all arranged and was fixing to do it. She said, ‘Aw, Cavanaugh, for Christ’s sake. Later.’ She wasn’t really awake, but I felt put down worse than if she had been. Bitter. I felt cheated, denied my natural right to sleep. I thought, Sarah and I are married to one another. In so many words: ‘Sarah and I are married to one another.’”

“Each other,” I said, unbalanced, unable to stop myself.

“That’s what I meant. I thought how come we aren’t one flesh? You are one. I am one. I said she was a conventional bitch, not wanting to fuck me at 5 a.m. Always later. ‘Later’ means after dinner. The meal half-digested. Dishwasher chugging in the kitchen. ‘Later’ means the neighbor’s TV blasting in your window. One of my kids coughing in his room. You know what it’s like trying to fuck when your kid is coughing? I said she wanted to bring me down, make me do it on schedule like every married asshole in America. I was making a speech in the dark. She was curled up, her back to me. Her position. She’d gone right into it while I was talking. All of a sudden the bed dips and she’s lunging out of it, standing over me, crying. She said, ‘You’re doing this to torture me. Why are you torturing me? Night after night.’ I pulled her down. She didn’t resist. She would have let me, but I didn’t ball her. She wouldn’t have gotten up for the kids later. I’d have had to make their breakfast and pack their lunches.”

Cavanaugh stopped. Berliner said, “Yeah,” as if relieved. The word carried other colors, too — consent, condolence, amen — like a small, squalid bouquet. Paul echoed Berliner. “Yeah.”

Yeah-yeah was better than silence, but I wanted to add something. It was time to be supportive, as they say. Go out of oneself feelingly. Leap the psychic fence. Stand in Cavanaugh’s space. Let him know I feel what he feels. Properties of the heart are taxed by friendship. But I was tight. I felt implicated in Cavanaugh’s marital agonies. I’d merely listened to him and now I felt implicated. I couldn’t say that. It sounded moral.

Kramer said the point of the club was to tell everything. Should Cavanaugh have told me about Sarah? She was my friend. I didn’t want to know what she didn’t know I knew about her. I remembered Cavanaugh with other women, especially at college parties years ago. He always left with the prettiest ones. They looked virginal and obedient beside him, going off into the sexual night. How awesome. Like a religious experience. Cavanaugh was so huge. A famous athlete with the handsome, arrogant head of a warrior. Steep cliff-like cheeks and bright small eyes, tilted, high in his face. I’d seen that structure — long vertical planes and slanted eye slits — hammered into the steel of ancient helmets. He descended from heroes. Invincible, murderous, rapacious stock. Sarah wouldn’t fuck him at 5 a.m. What had the world come to? But why should she be so accommodating? Did his lunatic hard-on even have her particularly in mind? He’d begun to change; the great body was being taken from him, alienated by weird sleep rhythms. After midnight he springs from bed. He wants to fight, drink, speed, fuck. I thought of him driving the San Rafael Bridge in his pickup, ninety miles an hour, Angel Island looming in the black and moonlit bay, then the walls of San Quentin and the hills beyond. I could feel the undulations of the long bridge. My brain, trying to think what to say, wandered in images. Berliner mumbled, “Yeah,” as if Cavanaugh’s trouble, like a boulder, rumbled down his soul. Then he said, “Sex and sleep.” Words falling like pieces of life, dull, without relation, from disparate realms. Something came to me.

The great complaint of women: “You turn over after sex and go to sleep.” Then a sex-and-sleep story told to me by a student, Gilda Jordan, undergraduate from Malibu. Twenty years old, but with the brittle sophistication of a much older person. Tough laugh. Quick mouth. A scar like a silver hair beside her right eye. When she talked her hands were flags, agitating her bracelets, slapping at her necklace. The scar was another adornment, part of her activity, clatter, quickness. She called me by my first name. During office hours she’d stick her head in the doorway. “When is the final paper due?” She’d laugh. For her, the question was absurd, unreal, as if she were a “student.” Her father produced movies; she’d grown up with a movie mentality. Whatever she was, she “was.” Except for her scar. If she sat still for a moment, it would begin quietly to insist it was a scar. I’d wave her inside. She’d take the chair beside my desk, lighting a cigarette, and all at once start to gossip about herself.

The sex-and-sleep story came with a lot of laughs. She’d met this guy, laugh, and he inserted his penis into her. Laugh. “I mean we went to bed first.” She leaned toward me, slapped my knee, laughing. “You hear what I said?” Anyhow, he lay there, inside her, laugh, not moving even a little bit, laugh, laugh, laugh. Minutes passed. Then he twitched. He came. “Didn’t feel licit,” she cried, laugh, oh laugh. She had to drag herself out from under him because he was asleep. She felt she’d been fucked by an insect. She laughed. I laughed. Sex wakes women — think of Sleeping Beauty — and puts men to sleep.