Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

She went to parties on the two weekends following the rape and sat in darkened rooms while a hashish pipe went around and said things too deep for syntax and giggled hysterically, and in the intimate delirium of faces and darkness asked how one might get in touch with an abortionist if, perchance, one needed one. She didn’t talk about the rape but remembered the Turk had held her chin and she felt guilty but resistless and saw that his eyes didn’t focus and that, more than anything, lingered in her nerves, like birds screaming and inconsummate. She asked her clique about the signs of pregnancy, then asked herself if she wasn’t peeing more than usual. It seemed to spear down very hot and hard and longer than before, but she ascribed it to sphincters loosened upon the violent dissolution of the veil between vaginal post and lintel. When she asked the girls about an abortionist they laughed maniacally at the idea that any of them might know such a person, but, one at a time, appeared in her room to whisper names and telephone numbers and tell her about the different, techniques and the anesthetic she might expect if the man were considerate or brave enough to give her one. “They’re afraid of the cops,” said Sax, a tough number from Chicago who had been knocked up twice in her freshman year. “They want you out of the office as soon as possible.”

Harry surprised her by coming to town during his intersession break and she was so glad to see him she trembled. She introduced him to her house mother and her clique and he ate dinner with her in the dormitory the first night. The next day he went to classes with her and that evening they ate in the best restaurant in town, which wasn’t nearly as good as some Harry knew in the East but it was pretty good, and then they walked in the Midwestern twilight, watching swallows, listening to night hawks whistle, and she felt an accumulation of sympathy in the minutes and the hours, which became an urge, a possibility, and then a strong need to tell him, but she chatted mainly about her clique and said, “Quigley has funny nipples and Berkowitz would have a wonderful figure except for her thighs, which have no character. I love Sax’s figure. It’s like a skinny boy’s.” Harry made an indifferent face and shrugged in his tweeds, but quick frowns twitched after the facts and she went on, encouraged thus, going on, to go on and on. In his hotel room they had necking and writhing, then lay together breathless, tight, indeterminate, until he began talking about his dissertation. “A revolution in scholarship. The vitiation of many traditional assumptions. They say I write uncommonly well.” She told him about the rape. He sat up with words about the impossibility of confidence, the betrayal of expectations, the end of things. He was amazed, he said, the world didn’t break and the sky fall down. As far as he was concerned the ceremony of innocence was drowned. While he packed she rubbed her knees and stared at him. He noticed her staring and said, “I don’t like you.”

Wanda Chung was always in flight around corners, down hallways, up stairs, into bathrooms, and never spoke to people unless obliged to do so and then with fleeting, terrified smiles and her eyes somewhere else. She appeared at no teas or dances, received no calls and no boys at the reception desk, and Melanie and her clique gradually came to think of her as the most interesting girl in the dormitory. One afternoon after classes they decided to go to her room and introduce themselves. She wasn’t in so they entered the room and while waiting for her casually examined her closet which was packed with dresses and coats carrying the labels of good stores in San Francisco. Under her bed there were boxes of new blouses and sweaters, and they discovered her desk drawers were crammed with candy and empty candy wrappers. They left her room, never returned, and never again made any effort to introduce themselves to her, but Wanda, who for months had harbored a secret yearning to meet Melanie, decided, the day after Harry Stone left town, to go to Melanie’s room and present herself: “I am Wanda Chung. I live downstairs. I found this fountain pen. Could it be yours?” She bought a fountain pen and went to Melanie’s room and an instant after she knocked at the door she forgot her little speech and her desire to meet Melanie. The door gave way at the vague touch of her knuckles and started opening as if Wanda herself had taken the knob and turned it with the intention of getting into the room and stealing something, which is how she saw it, standing there as the door unbelievably, remorselessly, opened, sucking all motion and feeling out of her limbs and making her more and more thief in the possible eyes of anyone coming along. And then, into her dumb rigidity, swayed naked feet like bell clappers. She saw Melanie Green hanging by the neck, her pelvis twitching. Wanda dashed to the stairs, down to her room, and locked herself inside. She ate candy until she puked in her lap and fell asleep …

When the Turk read about the suicide he said in a slow, sick voice, “She loved me.” He got drunk and stumbled through the streets looking for a fight, but bumping strangers and firing clams of spit at their feet wasn’t sufficiently provocative, given his debauched and fiercely miserable appearance, to get himself punched or cursed or even shoved a little. He ended the night in a scrubby field tearing at an oak tree with his fingernails, rolling in its roots, hammering grass, cursing the sources of things until, in a shy, gentle way, Melanie drifted up out of the dew. He refused to acknowledge her presence but then couldn’t tolerate being looked at in silence and yelled at her in furious Turkish. She came closer. He seized her in his arms and they rolled together in the grass until he found himself screaming through his teeth because, however much of himself he lavished on her, she was dead.

“PHILLIP,” SHE SAID, “THIS IS CRAZY.”

I didn’t agree or disagree. She wanted some answer. I bit her neck. She kissed my ear. It was nearly three in the morning. We had just returned. The apartment was dark and quiet. We were on the living-room floor and she repeated, “Phillip, this is crazy.” Her crinoline broke under us like cinders. Furniture loomed all around — settee, chairs, a table with a lamp. Pictures were cloudy blotches drifting above. But no lights, no things to look at, no eyes in her head. She was underneath me and warm. The rug was warm, soft as mud, deep. Her crinoline cracked like sticks. Our naked bellies clapped together. Air fired out like farts. I took it as applause. The chandelier clicked. The clock ticked as if to split its glass. “Phillip,” she said,“this is crazy.” A little voice against the grain and power. Not enough to stop me. Yet once I had been a man of feeling. We went to concerts, walked in the park, trembled in the maid’s room. Now in the foyer, a flash of hair and claws. We stumbled to the living-room floor. She said, “Phillip, this is crazy.” Then silence, except in my head, where a conference table was set up, ashtrays scattered about. Priests, ministers, and rabbis were rushing to take seats. I wanted their opinion, but came. They vanished. A voice lingered, faintly crying, “You could mess up the rug, Phillip, break something …” Her fingers pinched my back like ants. I expected a remark to kill good death. She said nothing. The breath in her nostrils whipped mucus. It cracked in my ears like flags. I dreamed we were in her mother’s Cadillac, trailing flags. I heard her voice before I heard the words. “Phillip, this is crazy. My parents are in the next room.” Her cheek jerked against mine, her breasts were knuckles in my nipples. I burned. Good death was killed. I burned with hate. A rabbi shook his finger: “You shouldn’t hate.” I lifted on my elbows, sneering in pain. She wrenched her hips, tightened muscles in belly and neck. She said, “Move.” It was imperative to move. Her parents were thirty feet away. Down the hall between Utrillos and Vlamincks, through the door, flick the light and I’d see them. Maybe like us, Mr. Cohen adrift on the missus. Hair sifted down my cheek. “Let’s go to the maid’s room,” she whispered. I was reassured. She tried to move. I kissed her mouth. Her crinoline smashed like sugar. Pig that I was, I couldn’t move. The clock ticked hysterically. Ticks piled up like insects. Muscles lapsed in her thighs. Her fingers scratched on my neck as if looking for buttons. She slept. I sprawled like a bludgeoned pig, eyes open, loose lips. I flopped into sleep, in her, in the rug, in our scattered clothes.