Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

The boy twisted into the ladies’ room. A dozen faces bloomed in peripheral vision, like vegetables of his mind. A lady in a hat said, “Creep.” Beneath the hat, her small shrill eyes recognized Liebowitz. She said “Creep” as if it were his name. “Mister Creep,” he muttered, pushing away through the liquid of gathering attention. He didn’t run. But he was ready, if anyone moved toward him, to run.

In the brilliant windy street, Liebowitz hailed a cab. Before it stopped, he had the door open. The meter began ticking. Ticking with remorseless, giddy indifference to his personal being and yet, somehow, consonant with himself. Not his heart, not the beat of his viscera, and yet his ticking self, his time, quickly and mercifully growing shorter. I’ll be dead soon, he thought. Tick-tick-tick.

The driver said, “ Where , mister?”

“Nowhere,” said Liebowitz from the creaks and shadows in back.

“You can sit in the park for free. This is costing you.”

To Liebowitz, the smug, annoyed superiority of the driver’s tone was Manhattan’s theme. He ignored it, lit a cigarette, breathed in the consolations of technology, and said, “I want to pay. Shut up.”

I’D WORK AT A STORYuntil it was imperative to quit and go read it aloud. My friend would listen, then say, “I feel so embarrassed for you.” I’d tear up the story. I’d work at a new one until it was imperative to quit and read aloud. My new friend would listen, but wouldn’t say good, no good, or not bad. I’d tear up the story.

Meanwhile, I turned to relatives and friends for help. My uncle Zev told me about his years in a concentration camp. “Write it,” he said. “You’ll make a million bucks.” My friend Tony Icona gave me lessons in breaking and entering. Zev’s stories I couldn’t use. Tony’s lessons were good as gold. Criminal life was intermittent and quick. It left me time to work at stories and learn about tearing them up.

One evening, while I was reading to my new friend, she yawned. It was the fifth time I had read this story to her. The hour was late. She had to get up at dawn to leave for work. But I had rewritten the story and had to read it aloud, start to finish. I watched her eyes go fluid, her mouth enlarge. I saw fillings in her teeth and the ciliations of her tongue. By the time she completed her yawn, our friendship had ended.

After I understood so much about stories and friendship, it was easier to write stories and more difficult not to tear them up. There was bad tension between my new friend and me when I tore up a story she liked, but I did it for her sake and mine. Even as she beamed and clapped with delight, I tore it up and stepped on it.

My appeals to Tony Icona for lessons in quick, remunerative work became more frequent. I told him how hard it was to write stories without being a liar or a bore, and there was nothing, nothing, I was unwilling to do for time. He listened, picked his nose, then said if I ended up in the slam doing time, I’d kill myself. He said one person wanted money and power; the other had ideals. Both got money and power. As for himself, he liked walking on the beach in a tight bathing suit and lifting dumbbells in the sun. “That’s purity, right?”

When my newest friend said the story was good, but I knew otherwise, I’d be angry and she would begin to cry. She couldn’t ignore the solicitous mother in my voice, offering encouragement and music while the story did nothing for itself. She’d let the voice tell her lies, darken her understanding, weaken her will, and incline her toward evil. To make her know it, I broke her nose. Then I couldn’t write. “Don’t you want to read anything to me?” she’d ask, fingering her nose. “It will never be the same, you know.”

When I started again, reading to my newest friend, she’d say, “That reminds me of what happened at work. Can I tell you?” I’d say, “Tell me.” She was an astonishing bore. Listening to her, I tore up all my stories, never wrote stories, broke into cars, climbed through windows, and poisoned dogs. She told me what happened to her at work. I made myself ugly, lonely, and miserable.

I explained my condition to Tony Icona, a man to whom I could speak in a theoretical way. He said, “I can’t sympathize. You got one leg shorter than the other and you’re walking in a circle. But I’ll give you a job in my delicatessen. Fifty bucks a week and you keep your tips. If the customers like you, you’ll do all right. If they don’t, you’ll starve and be known as a dope.”

The delicatessen, called Horses, was a giant hall with a long bar, mirrors on the walls and ceiling, and a hundred tables. It rang plates and cutlery; twenty chefs boiled at the steam counters and the floor thundered with speeding waiters in black tie, jacket, and shoes. I thundered among them, a napkin slapped across my forearm. At my shoulder a trayload of relishes, bread, and meat. Ladies snatched my elbow and said, “Please, darling. Could you be so wonderful as to bring me a lean pastrami and a piece of cheesecake?” They’d cling and whimper, lips speckled with anticipatory saliva, pleading for complicity in the desire to eat. Then they’d say, “Was it too much to ask, darling? A lean pastrami?” I felt guilty of revolting gristle and the miseries that brought them to Horses. I’d swear there is no such thing as a lean pastrami, pleading for complicity in truth. My tips were small. I was known as a dope. But I studied other waiters and learned to say, “Here, sweetie, just for you — a lean pastrami. Enjoy.” My pleasure in their pleasure was their pleasure. My tips were tremendous. When next I learned to say, “Eat, bitch. Stop when you get to the plate,” my tips were fantastic.

Sometimes I’d slip into the back of the delicatessen, hide in the meat locker, smoking a cigarette in blood-rancid air, flayed animal tonnage hooked and blazing about my head, and I’d think, There is no such thing as lean pastrami.

After work I’d see my newest friend, the one who told me boring stories. Her name was Memory. She’d take off my shoes and socks, then wash my feet. A swinish indulgence, but I had the corns of Odysseus and ancient sentiments. Besides, she had needs in her knees, and it was her way of making me uncritical when she told a story. So much like a lie. Always a bore.

Telling what happened to her at work, she began by saying what time she got up that morning, what the weather was like, and how it differed from the weather report she’d heard the evening before. The last thing she wanted to hear before shutting her eyes was what tomorrow would be like. She had fears of discontinuity. A city girl, nine to five in an office. The days didn’t return to her bound each to each by daisies. The weather report was her connection between Monday and Tuesday. One night the man said, “Tomorrow it will not rain.” But it rained. Gusty, slapping rain. She said, “Isn’t that strange?” She told me what bus she took in the rain, to get the bus that took her near enough to walk, in the rain, to her office. As always, she bought a newspaper to read during coffee break. The newspaper, the coffee break — with Memory I had mortal fears. I hated her story. I wanted her to go on and on. She told me what her boss said before lunch, and what he said after lunch when they chanced to meet in the hallway outside her office as she returned from the ladies’ room. She told me that her boss — a married man with three kids — for the first time since she’d been working for him made sexual advances. That was the end of her story. She didn’t stop talking or lift her glance to mine. She massaged my corns a bit harder.

I said, “Did you say broom closet?”