Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

Others came by, stopped.

“Miss Genitalia, I’d like you to meet Miss Gapegunda.”

“I’m sure she’ll come back, Max. It’s not like her to run out. She doesn’t have carfare.”

“If she comes back I’ll spit in her face.”

Marjorie was breathing as if she were asleep. I listened to her and to the people who came by and stopped outside the door.

“What you said, Irma, makes a lot of sense,” said a man.

“I was just talking.”

“But very intelligently.”

“You can’t mean that. I was talking, that’s all. If you don’t talk at these parties they think you’re a fool.”

“I do mean it. I’d like you to write it all up and submit it to my journal. Do you write German?”

Another man wheezed.

“Shut up, sweetheart. All right? Just once you shut up, all right? It’s not so much to ask, is it? I say yes, you say no. I say no, you say yes. Why don’t you write a book and shut up? Write one of mine in reverse. Where I say no you say yes.”

“Fuck you, Ned.”

Marjorie was asleep, wrapped around my arm like ten snakes. I moved a little. She constricted and said, “Nya, nya.”

I lay still again and gaped into the darkness. It was important to think. I had a sense of the problematic towering above me in the darkness like a Gothic cathedral. Complex, violent, full of contradictions like the hairdo of a madwoman. I fell asleep. In my sleep I heard a knock at the door. It came drifting over waters like Noah’s dove, little gray wings knocking through fog. It came closer, closer. I cried, “Here, little dovey.” It went by, knocking dimly away into the fog.

“Phillip,” said Henry.

I yelled in my dream, “Henureee.”

Marjorie woke up, hissed, “Don’t answer.”

I tried to wake up.

“Phillip, you there? Who’s there?”

Marjorie began moving all over me. She ripped open my shirt. She scraped off my shoes with her toes. I woke up as my zipper went down like a slashed throat. She wrenched under me. I said, “Love.” She yelled and pummeled my back as if sending messages to friends across the veldt. “What’s wrong?” I said.

“I like it, I like it,” she yelled.

“Like what?” I said.

“Who’s in there?” said Henry.

“Don’t come in,” I said.

His footsteps went away.

Marjorie went limp, her arms outflopped, languid as lily stalks.

“Finish,” she said.

Her legs fell apart as if cleaved by an ax.

“Hurry,” she said.

I hurried. Footsteps came back to the door. There was a knock.

“Marjorie,” said Henry. “Was that you in there?”

I hurried.

“Wait for me,” she said. “Slow down.”

“Of course,” said Henry. “You know I will.”

I slowed down.

“Do it,” she said.

“I won’t move an inchy winchy until you tell me to.” He made a kissing against the door.

“Up and down, up and down,” she said.

“Ha, ha,” said Henry. He jumped up and down, up and down. “Like this?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Nee, nee, nee he laughed. “Here I go up and down, up and down,” he sang. “I’m skipping rope.”

“Now,” she yelled.

“Now?” said Henry. “Di oo say now now?”

“Wow, wow,” she said.

“Marjorie,” I said.

“Henry,” she screamed.

He flung open the door. I was behind it. He laughed nee, nee, jumped up and down, and came skipping into the room. I flew out. His knees struck the floor like cannonballs.

“Marjorie,” he said.

“Love.”

I got my flowers and wine and slipped out into the night. It was moonless and cold. I slipped into it nose first. It nosed into me. I twitched like a fish and went quivering through dingy dingles, from blackness to blackness to blackness to blackness.

TALMUDIC SCHOLAR, MASTER OF CABALA, Isaac felt vulnerable to a thousand misfortunes in New York, slipped on an icy street, lay on his back, and wouldn’t reach for his hat. People walked, traffic screamed, freezing damp sucked through his clothes. He let his eyes fall shut — no hat, no freezing, no slip, no street, no New York, no Isaac — and got a knock against the soles of his shoes. It shook his teeth. His eyes flashed open, darkness spread above him like a predatory tree, a dozen buttons glared, and a sentence flew out, beak and claws, with a quality of moral sophistication indistinguishable from hatred: “What’s-a-matta, fuckhead, too much vino?” He’d never heard of vino, but had a feeling for syntax — fuckhead was himself. He said, “Eat pig shit,” the cop detected language, me-it became I-thou and the air between them a warm, viable medium. He risked English: “I falled on dot ice, tenk you.”

The man in the next bed wasn’t alive. Gray as a stone, hanging over the edge of the mattress, the head was grim to consider. But only a fool points out the obvious; Isaac wouldn’t tell a nurse. Even so, he couldn’t dismiss a head upside down, staring at him, and found himself crying. He had traveled thousands of miles to fall down like a fuckhead and lie beside a corpse. Crying loosened muscles. His shoulders began moving. Shoulders moving, he discovered arms moving, and if arms, why not legs? In his left leg moved thunder and lightning. But he sat up and shouted, “Sitting!” A nurse ripped open his pajamas and shoved in a bedpan. “I appreciate,” he said, and defecated.

Before dawn he had dressed himself and was in the street. Stumbling, pressing into the dark as if pursued by dogs. More and more he tilted left and thus, beneath horrible pain, felt horrible geometry. His left leg was shorter than his right. He pressed into a phone booth. His sister screamed when she heard his voice. He told her what happened and she screamed, “Don’t move.” He sat in the booth, fell asleep, there was a knock and his eyes opened. She looked through the glass. “Katya,” he said, “like a coffin.” She wouldn’t discuss the idea. Neither would Chaim, her husband, or Fagel, her husband’s sister, or hunchback Yankel, the peddler, who asked where Isaac felt pain. In the back? In the leg? He remembered a fall in which he hurt his knee. Did Isaac’s knee hurt? No? Very strange. How did a scholar, he wondered, fall in the street like an animal; but then what’s one leg shorter compared to a brain concussion with blood bulging from the eyes? No comparison. Lucky Isaac. Isaac winked, made a little lucky nod, and collapsed. Fagel screamed. Katya screamed. Chaim gave Isaac his umbrella. Isaac pressed it with one hand. The other pressed his sister’s arm. They went down the street together — Isaac, Katya, Fagel, Chaim, Yankel. Cracow, the chiropractor, had an office nearby.

To keep his mind off his stumbling torture, Katya told Isaac about Moisse, who wasn’t lucky. He came to New York sponsored by a diamond merchant, friend of politicians, bon vivant, famous for witty exegeses of the Talmud. “So?” So as a condition of sponsorship, Moisse promised never to abandon, in New York, any tradition of the faith. He imagined no circumstances in which he might, but married, opened a dry-goods store, and had a son. Circumstances arose in doctor bills. He had to do business on Saturdays. Isaac licked his lips. Chaim punched his chest. Yankel shrugged his hunch. “So?” So it followed like the manifestation in the garden, that the merchant’s beard hung in the door one Saturday. — You know what day this is, Moisse? What could he say? Isaac said, “Nothing. What could he say?” Chaim punched, Yankel shrugged. The beard nodded. The mouth hacked up a spittle, the spittle smacked the floor, and the baby son was discovered on the prostrate body of his mother, shrieking like a demon while he ate the second nipple. Now Moisse doesn’t do business on Saturday. His worst enemies won’t say he isn’t a saint.