Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

THE CONVERSATION

We twisted up together in New York. Intimacy was insult; love could hate. Then I went away. Years passed. He came to visit. It wasn’t easy to talk. Finally I mentioned a pornographic movie. He said,“Which pornographic movie?” I said, “You distinguish carefully among them?” He didn’t smile. As if to spare my feelings, he began talking about New York. The complexities, the intensities. I listened with humble attention, trying to remember the title of the pornographic movie. Naked bodies came to mind, agitating to the impulses of community. If I’d remembered the title, I’d have screamed it. But I couldn’t remember. He went on, the Metropolis of Total Excitement flying out of his mouth. Later, I asked him to see the other rooms in my house. It was a corny gesture. But he stood right up and made an urbane shrug, suggesting revulsion or eagerness. I led him out of the foyer. When we came to my study I pushed the windows wide. “Trees, birds,” I said. He grinned a mellow hook and didn’t glance at the view. He said, “Do you know about Sartre’s study?” I said, “No; so what.” He said, “Jean-Paul Sartre’s study gives out upon great Parisian avenues. They converge in his desk. Endless human traffic converges in Jean-Paul Sartre’s desk.” I said, “Actually, I hate trees and birds. They make me sick.” He giggled, poked my arm, told me to go fuck myself. “Why?” I asked. He said, “Because you’re deficient in social hormones.” I laughed, “That’s the title of the pornographic movie. Social Hormones.” I laughed, but his remark felt incisive; I couldn’t be sure what he meant. In the foyer again, I shook his hand, slapped his back. He was rattling goodbyes, edging out the door, looking at me with exhilaration.

THE SNAKE

The road, crowded by woods on either side, turned whimsically as a line of smoke, taking its own peculiar way, unpredictable, inevitable as fate, but I continued driving hard, pressing it until I’d go too fast and have to slow suddenly, holding the turn until I could press again, fast, faster. It was like that for hours. Me against it. I was tired. She was bored, nervous, giddy. Whenever I said anything, she’d say, “Awfully Jewish of you.” She giggled, tried to read a magazine, brushed her hair. I smoked cigarettes, attacked the road, and stopped talking to her. She played with the radio knobs, pulled up her skirt, stroked her legs. Then I noticed a brown snake. I stopped the car. “Drive over it,” she said. “Don’t you leave this car.” I left the car. She moaned, “Please.” The snake was thicker than my foot. Blinkless eyes; medals of mud against its sides; tiny sticks of grass embedded in the mud. Ants crawled across the scales. She said, “Please.” Her voice was bright, meaningless, far away. I crouched and reached slowly — toward the neck — a necessity. It would fill my fist; whip; hiss. She yelled, “My mother was bitten by a brown snake like that, you New York asshole.” I grabbed it. I screamed. She tumbled out of the car. I lifted the snake. It hung. It was a dead snake. We got back into the car and sat there quietly. Then I asked her to marry me. She said, “O.K.” We laughed and fucked until dark.

LIVER

“Everything is fine,” I said. My mother said,“I hope so.” I said,“It is, it is.” My mother said, “I hope so.” I said, “Everything is wonderful. Couldn’t be better. How do you feel?” My mother said, “Like a knife is pulling out of my liver.”

TROTSKY IS WRITING. He will mention his love of life and his unqualified faith in dialectical materialism. He will mention Natasha, the strip of green outside his window, his invincible atheism, and he will contemplate his death. It is morning. Trotsky sits at his wooden desk. He looks at letters and a blotter. The Mexican sun burns in the green outside his window, just opened by Natasha. Trotsky notices. Natasha and the green slide into his writing. A man will strike Trotsky in the head with a pickax. Trotsky’s sons — murdered — are mentioned in the writing. From Russia to Mexico, friends, secretaries, and bodyguards — murdered — are mentioned in the writing. In Berlin, where he sent her for psychoanalysis, his daughter killed herself. The pen does not cease or grovel in individuals. Trotsky will mention his faith in dialectical materialism, his faith in meaning. His mother suffered difficulties in reading; she crouched over novels and said, “Beta, alpha …” Trotsky says:

If I could begin all over, I would try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist.

Dialectical materialism, in the heat of the day, draws a pickax from its raincoat. Some say “rusty ax.” Others say “ice pick.” Trotsky himself noticed nothing — it descended from behind — but he will bite the assassin’s hand. He is writing that if he lived again, he would avoid mistakes. The sun, as it did yesterday and will tomorrow, is shining. Trotsky loves the green outside his window and flourishes it in his writing. We shout, “O.K., Trotsky, no time for poems.” He cannot hear us. His poem is a march of corpses, the din is terrific. Feet are beating in his writing. The sun is in the green in his writing. Sedova, the aristocrat, lifts her elbow for photographers. “See? A bullet made that ugly scratch. My old man isn’t nobody. Yesterday they machine-gunned our bedroom.” She means, From revolution to Mexico, Trotsky is pursued by his inventions. Trotsky himself says that he put the idea of exile into the ear of Stalin’s spy; hence, into the mind of Stalin. In effect, Trotsky exiled Trotsky and machine-gunned his bedroom. Now, writing that one cannot be reborn until one is dead — and look: it sits beside him with a raincoat and pickax. It makes nervous conversation about alphabetical materialism. Suddenly Trotsky is fighting, not writing. Blood runs into his eyes. Nevertheless, he catches the personal fact. Who said Lenin is morally repulsive, and Stalin is a savage who hates ideas, and Parvus is a fat, fleshy bulldog head? Trotsky said these things. Now the assassin’s hand is in his teeth. With fury of intimacy, Trotsky bites. This hand wanted to remind him of something. But what? On the wall outside, the guards carry rifles and binoculars. They are gossiping in the sun when Trotsky screams. They see him standing in the window, bleeding and blind, a figure of history. “What?” he screams. The assassin is behind him, bent, sobbing like a child as he sucks his mutilated hand. The guards are running on the wall with their rifles and binoculars. Freud lights a cigar and contemplates this tableau. He says, “Trotsky and I were neighbors in Vienna.” Trotsky admired Freud. He sent him his best daughter. Now Trotsky shouts in the window: “What does it mean? Such heat. In such heat a raincoat …” Trotsky flings toward his wooden desk. He needs only seconds to write: “On hot days in Mexico beware of raincoats.”

1

The butler says, “Lord Byron jumped out of the carriage and walked away.” Annabella appeared next. The butler says, “The bride alighted, and came up the steps alone, her countenance and frame agonized and listless with evident horror and despair.” A scarf, twisted about her head, was bunched up in imitation of a hat. Others report the arrival, among them Lord Byron. His memoirs were burned. One who read them claims Lord Byron took Annabella before dinner. They withdrew after dinner and lay in a four-poster bed near a fireplace. The crimson curtains of the bed, quickened by firelight, made flickering blood-colored walls. Lord Byron imagined himself within the membranes of a giant stomach. “I am in hell,” he screamed. Annabella crept downstairs, hid in the kitchen, and later begged medical advice. Assured that Lord Byron was mysterious, not mad, she hired investigative agents. A year passes. The incontinent Lord Byron flees to the Continent. His affair with his sister, consummated before the marriage, is being noised about. People cut him at parties. He flees; soon thereafter, dies in Greece. Annabella’s agents rush into the room. Lord Byron’s servant — a bad — tempered man named Fletcher — draws his sabre but they beat him unconscious and rip the boot from Lord Byron’s crippled foot. They saw a hoof of great beauty, subtly united with the fetlock. The memoirs — where Lord Byron mentioned it — were burned at Annabella’s insistence. Now, sufficient to say, in the mass of Byroniana — letters, scholarship, gossip — no extended reference to his hoof exists.