Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“Fein,” she whispered.

“Finn,” he said.

She pulled free. “I think I need a cigarette. I mean I really need a cigarette, but I’d like to talk a little.”

Minutes later Finn was tapping the steering wheel with his fingernails. “I’m the only one who knows you’re Jewish?”

“Well, actually, my mother converted years and years ago.”

Finn drove to Slotsky’s place and knocked until the door opened on Slotsky in underwear, his face deranged behind fingers shoving glasses against his eyes. “For Christ’s sake. What the hell do you want?”

Finn shrugged, mumbled. Slotsky stared. The hall light made him look papery. Without a word Finn took off his jacket, then handed it to Slotsky. Slotsky frowned and shook his head.

“Take,” said Finn.

“I don’t want it.”

“Take.”

“No.”

Shaking his head, Slotsky backed into the room. Finn shuffled after him, jacket stiff-armed at Slotsky’s chest.

“Take it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Yes.”

“Screw you. Get out of here, creep.”

“Take it or I’ll jam it down your throat.”

“Screw you, Fein.”

Finn lunged, stabbed the jacket against Slotsky’s chest. Slotsky fell, smacking the floor with both palms, and Finn threw the jacket at his head. It caught over his head and chest like a lamp shade. Beneath it Slotsky screamed for help. Finn slammed the door. Slotsky shut up.

Alone and tired, Finn drove around town, the night droning, crowding into the car, pressing at the borders of his brain. He checked the dashboard again and again … twenty-five miles an hour … three-thirty … twenty-eight miles an hour … a quarter past four … less than half a tank of gas … ten past five …

And then Finn had a little waking dream in which he saw himself in Slotsky’s glasses and Slotsky in his jacket, and Slotsky took his hand and he put his arm around Slotsky and they danced in the headlights, big Finn, black Slotsky, like ballroom champions, gracefully mutual, dancing for the delectation of millions until Finn hit the gas and crushed them into rushing blacktop.

BECKMAN, A DAY OUT OF THE HOSPITAL,barely strong enough to walk the streets for a job, carrying a ruined face that wouldn’t heal for weeks and probably never look the same, was shocked to find himself hired at the first place he tried, as assistant to a paint contractor, and thought to tell his parents and write his girl to come back from Chicago and marry him, but, recalling disappointments with jobs in the past, decided to wait, not say anything, and see how things went; to see if they continued to be real as the hard, substantial hand which had enveloped and strongly shaken his hand, less rough and hairy, but masculine, calloused by the wheel and stick of his trade, and a substantial hand, too; if not in muscle and bone, certainly in spirit, for in that shake Beckman was welcomed to the end of a successful interview and a life made wretched by rattling kidneys, the stench of gasoline, of cigarettes, of perfume and alcohol and vomit, the end of surly toughs, drunken women, whoring soldiers, vagrant blacks and whites, all the streaming, fearsome, pathetic riffraff refuse of the city’s dark going places, though places in hell, while he, Beckman, driver of the cab, went merely everyplace, anyplace, until the sun returned the day and he stopped, parked, dropped his head against the seat, and lay mindless, cramped, chilled in a damp sweater and mucky underwear, lay seized by the leather seat, debauched by the night’s long, winding, resonant passage and the abuse of a thousand streets.

Everyplace Beckman, anyplace Beckman, he went noplace until two figures in misty, dismal twilight hailed his cab — a man with a pencil mustache; a woman with big, slick, black eyes, orange lipstick, and Indian cheekbones — got in and beat him up while he begged, shrieking, “Take my money.” They did, and they left him for dead.

They left him for dead, Beckman, who revived in a hospital and asked for a newspaper with his first deliberate words, and read want ads and thought about his life, so nearly his death, with a powerful, urgent thrust of mind entirely unlike the vague motions it had been given to while drifting through the dark streets of the city.

Something dreadful — running over a drunk, a collision with another car — might have happened sooner or later, but the beating, the beating, was precisely what he deserved, what he needed after years scouring the avenues like a dog, waiting for change to come into his life as if it might hail him from a corner like another fare. Indeed it had. Deserved, too, because he, Beckman, unlike the average misérable, could understand his own experience, and not without pride, he acknowledged the deity which had hailed him in the shape of twilight creatures and presented his face to their fists — as an omen, as a reminder of who he was — Beckman, son of good people who, when he pulled up before their two-story house in Riverdale on his monthly visit, became literally sick.

They were happy of course to see their son, but Beckman, winner of second place in an all-city essay contest celebrating fire prevention week, open to every child in New York, Beckman, the college graduate, history and economics major, risking life with strangers, ruining health in a filthy machine, it literally made them sick.

Laughing, telling stories, even a bit cocky, Beckman would finger the badge with his taxi number on it while his mother’s eyes, with unblinking persistence, told him he was miserable, and his father, puffing a cigar against doctor’s orders, sat quietly, politely killing himself, nodding, chuckling at the stories until Beckman left and he could stagger out of the room and grope down the wall to his bed. Behind the wheel, Beckman flicked the ignition key, squinted his mind’s eye, and saw his father prostrate with a headache, and Beckman gunned the motor, gunned house and street, his mother’s eyes and father’s rotten heart and headache.

There had been omens in his life not so damaging, if hair loss, shortness of breath, and wrinkles around the eyes and mouth were omens, but death had never been so close and tangible, and Beckman had never thought, I am going to die, as he had, sprawled begging, writhing on the floor of his cab. Oh, he had felt the proximity of annihilation just passing a strange man on a dark street or making love to his girl, but the thrill of imminent nothing always came to nothing, gone before he might study it, leaving him merely angry or vacant and low. But now, like Pascal emerging from the carriage after nearly falling from it to his death, like Dostoevsky collapsed against the wall scribbling notes as the firing squad, dissolved by the witty czar, walked off giggling, like Lazarus rising, Beckman was revived, forever qualified and so profoundly reminded of himself he felt like someone else.

Hitting him, the woman cried,“Hey, hey, Beckman,” a series of words chanted with the flat exuberance and dull inertia of a work song, repeated without change in pitch or intensity while fists rocked his skull and Beckman thrashed in the darkness, flapped his hands, and begged them to take his money and continued begging as they dragged him by his hair over the front seat and onto the floor in back where the mat reeked of whiskey, stale butts, the corruption of lungs, and a million yards of bowel. “Hell your lousy money, Beckman,” said the woman, her spikes in his face and ribs as the man, squealing with effort, pummeled straight down into Beckman’s groin. But the punches and kicks were heralds, however brutal, bearing oracles of his genius, the bludgeoning shapers of himself if properly understood. Years ago he should have had this job with the paint contractor, a steady salary, and his nights to sleep in.