Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

MA

I said, “Ma, do you know what happened?” She said, “Oh my God.”

NAKED

Ugly or plain she would have had fewer difficulties cultivating an attractive personality or restricting sex to cortex, but she was so nearly physically perfect as to appear, more than anything, not perfect. Not ugly, not plain, then strikingly not perfect made her also not handsome and not at all sentimentally appealing. In brief, what she was she wasn’t, a quality salient in adumbration, unpossessed. She lived a bad metaphor, like the Devil, unable to assimilate paradox to personal life, being no artist and not a religious, suffering spasms of self-loathing in the lonely, moral night. Finally, she smacked a Coke bottle on the rim of the bathtub, mutilated her wrist, then phoned the cops. So clumsy, yet her dinner parties were splendid, prepared at unbelievable speed. She hated to cook. Chewing gum, cigarettes, candy, drugs, alcohol, and taxicabs took her from Monday to Friday. The ambulance attendant — big ironical black man in baggy white trousers — flipped open the medicine cabinet and yelled, “See those barbiturates. You didn’t have to make a mess.” He dragged her out of the tub by the hair, naked, bleeding. She considered all that impressive, but if I responded to her with a look or tone, she detected my feelings before I did and made them manifest, like a trout slapped out of water by a bear. “You admire my eyes? How about my ass?” I thrilled to her acuity. But exactly then she’d become a stupid girl loosening into sexual mood, and then, then, if I touched her she offered total sprawl, whimpering, “Call me dirty names.” I tried to think of her as a homosexual person, not a faggot. She begged me to wear her underpants and walk on my knees. When I demurred, she pissed on the sheets. “You don’t love me,” she said. “What a waste getting involved with you.” Always playing with her flashy, raglike scar, sliding it along the tendons like a watchband.

BETTER

I phoned and said, “I feel good, even wonderful. Everything is great. It’s been this way for months and it’s getting better. Better, better, better. How are you, Ma?” She said, “Me?” I said, “Yes, how are you?” “Me?” she said. “Don’t make me laugh.”

LIEBOWITZ MAKEShis head out of cigarettes and coffee, goes to the West Side subway, stands in a screaming iron box, and begins to drift between shores of small personal misery and fantastic sex, but this morning he felt fingers and, immediately, the flow of his internal life forked into dialogue between himself — standing man who lived too much blind from the chest down — and the other, a soft inquisitive spider pinching the tongue of his zipper, dragging it toward the iron floor that boomed in the bones of his rooted feet, boomed in his legs, and boomed through his unzipped fly. Thus, with no how-do-you-do, Liebowitz was in the hand of an invisible stranger. Forty-second Street, the next stop, was minutes away. Liebowitz tried to look around. Was everyone groping everyone else? Fads in Manhattan spread to millions. Liebowitz didn’t care to make a fuss, distinguish himself with a cranky, strictly personal statement. He tried to be objective, to look around, see what’s what in the IRT. On his left, he saw a Negro woman with a tired sullen profile and a fat neck the color of liver. Directly ahead he saw a white man’s pale earlobe dangling amid the ravages of a mastoid operation, behind the tension lines of an incipient scowl; his sentiment of being. Against Liebowitz’s back were the pillars of indeterminate architecture; palpable and democratic weight. On his right, steeped in a miasma of deodorants and odorants, stood a high school girl. Thick white makeup, black eyeliner, and lipstick-blotched mouth, which, in the sticky puddle of surrounding skin, seemed to suck and drink her face. Her hair, bleached scraggle, hung. She stared up at an advertisement for suntan lotion, reading and reading and reading, as if it were a letter from God. Telling her perhaps, thought Liebowitz, to wash the crap off her face. Her blotch hung open. She breathed through eight little teeth.

There were others to consider, but Liebowitz decided communications issued from the girl stinking perfume, dreaming of the sun. He didn’t look down. He didn’t look at her directly. Why not? He was ashamed. Is that any way to feel? It is the way he felt. Besides, Liebowitz thought a direct look might seem aggressive, even threatening, and he didn’t want her to stop. Of course, not looking down, he couldn’t be sure who was doing it. But whoever it was perhaps couldn’t be sure to whom it was being done. Did this make a difference? Yes, thought Liebowitz. A difference between debauchery and election. Unsought, unanticipated, unearned. Not sullied by selfish, inadmissible need. He didn’t think, Filthy need. He made a bland face. It felt good. Some might call this “a beautiful experience.”

In effect, 8:30 a.m., going to work, crushed, breathing poison in a screaming iron box, Liebowitz was having a beautiful experience. People paid money for this. He could think of no reason not to give it a try. Liebowitz was a native New Yorker, with an invulnerable core of sophistication. He realized suddenly that he felt — beyond pleasure — hip. After so many years in the subway without feeling, or feeling he wasn’t feeling, he felt. Getting and spending, he thought. And now he had gotten lucky. He believed he had done nothing to account for it, which was the way it had to be if the experience was miraculous, beautiful, warm, and good. Like the unaccountable sun shining in the advertisement. Or, for that matter, in the sky. Lucky, thrilled, beatified. All of it was assumed with silent, immobilized dignity. He got lucky and floated half blind, delicious, cool, proud to be a New Yorker. He floated above a naked ferocity which, he knew, he couldn’t call his own. The emblem and foundation of his ethical domain — wife, child, responsibility of feeding them, the “Mr.” on his tax forms — and yet, had someone said, “Who belongs to this hard-on?” Liebowitz himself would have led the search. Despite denials and scruples, Liebowitz had a general, friendly hard-on. Even without an object, his sensations were like love.

He came.

Fingers squeezed goodbye, replaced him, zipped up, slipped away. The train stopped at Forty-second Street, doors opened, the crowd dissolved, shuffling huggermugger hugely to the platform. The man with the incipient scowl stepped away. A garden of camellias flashed down his pants leg. Liebowitz looked elsewhere. Bleary, ringing with a chill apocalyptic sense, he was pressed loose and dopey into the crowd’s motions. Moving, he began to move himself, popping up on his toes, peering over heads. The girl with the deathly hair had disappeared. On the platform now, amid figures going left, right, and shoving past him toward the train, Liebowitz was seized in a confusion of vectors, but, gathering deep internal force, his direction, himself, he thrust to the right, on his toes, and saw it — limp, ghoulish scraggle flying away like a ghostly light. Exhilaration building, beating in him like hawks, he felt his good luck the second time that morning. To let things end in the dingy, dirty, booming abyss of the Forty-second Street subway station would be a desecration of feelings and a mystery forever, he thought, chasing amid gum machines, benches, kiosks, trash cans, and innumerable indifferent faces. She went up a flight of stairs, quickly, quickly, and — painful to Liebowitz — as if she didn’t care to know he was chasing her. Was there nothing between them? That’s what he wanted to know. He needed psychological consummation. He was a serious human being. He needed it now and here, in subway light, under low ceilings, in the pressure of heavy moving crowds. He caught her. Against the door of a ladies’ room, the instant she pressed it, he caught her arm, a thin bolt, and stopped her flight. “Miss,” he said, staring, beginning to say, “You know me, don’t you?” A weightless, overwrought rag of girl reeked in his close, tight grip. It whispered, “Get the claw off me, motherfucker, or I’ll kick your balls.” Whispering fire, writhing, murderous. Not a girl. Liebowitz let go.