Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“You can have the shoe, Mr. Liebowitz. Are you a man who wants things?”

“Everyone must want your things, Mrs. Stanger.”

And that’s what I thought. Yet I had to beg Mildred to dress for this party, comb her hair, show me good girl in the aspect of sullen bitch:

“Do you want to walk so quickly, Phillip? Do you want to suppose Stanger won’t give you the job if we’re two minutes late? Is it thrilling to have people think you’re out with some whore? Is that what you want? Take my arm, you bastard, or I don’t go another step.”

A savage ride on the IRT, then worse in the crosstown cab.

“Two bucks for a lousy cab. But if I need, really need, a pair of shoes, you throw a fit. Tomorrow, I buy shoes. Hear me?”

She hadn’t wanted to go. I had wanted to rush. Stanger had nodded at me, taken her arm, and la-la — I looked — his hand was on her knee. Wanting not to go, she had a moral advantage. She could now blow him and lift a virtuous face: “Don’t give me that jealous crap.”

Mrs. Stanger, apparently, wanted symmetry. A social lady with a Viking face, symmetrical by instinct. The ghost of long bone figure, unexorcised by a life of such occasions, still fighting, giving good as it got. Perfect for Stanger. Why not for me? One thinks meat or languishes.

Her eyes were tiger-bronze. They looked at me; not across the room at them. She seemed to be saying, “Do you really want the job, Mr. Liebowitz?” And she was. Winding her shoe, stirring a golden pool of time. I had five seconds, perhaps, to seem not stupid. The mathematics of her face demanded speed and precision, answers in kind, not self-analysis. I clicked on the smarts:

Stanger wanted Mildred. His missus wanted me. I wanted the job. The question was, then: What could I get? The answer answered everything. If I couldn’t get only what I wanted, I had to want what I could get, to get what I wanted. Things equal to the same equal one another.

“Do you really want the job, Mr. Liebowitz?”

I said, “Let’s fuck.”

She blinked and shook her head. She sighed.

I had been too quick, too smart. I shrugged like a man with nothing more to say, and looked across the room at them, sitting close together on a couch, talking. To express life’s failure, I lifted a cigarette. Mrs. Stanger knocked it out of my mouth. “That’s a social disease, Mr. Liebowitz.” She stood up in a blur of dancing and a storm of jazz, turned, pushed through shuddering couples, and went around a corner, disappeared. Reappeared. Frowning at me. To my feet I leaped.

Down a hall in pursuit of her gliding back, feeling concentrated in crotch, monolithic shark with blood in its nose and no appetite for analysis. I’d read that eating is the final extension of touch and believed it. I also believed the reverse. Paintings, etchings, Chinese jugs, chairs, tables, sculptured metals whispered as they flashed by, “Beast, beast, beast.” Right. Psychology and art were dead. I didn’t understand my motives, but that didn’t prove I had any. Does the moon have a motive? Aristotle says, “Love.” All right, love. Later, with nothing at stake, I’d return to this hall and contemplate a jug, make excuses for love, recall the meal, the hideous smiling, how he didn’t talk to me, how Mildred did. I’d argue, Between me and Mildred had loomed the shape of a foreign penis. His moon. My motive. I’d recall the job, my own penis, and I’d raise the distinction between men and women. Men do what they have to do. A woman can do anything a man can do, but does she have to? Mrs. Stanger didn’t have to open the door. I stepped through it into another world. The enemy of Freud, the son of Marx, Phillip Liebowitz. Plunging beyond analysis in the wake of a shark.

The walls bore guns, horsewhips, heads of gazelle, buffalo, giraffe, and photos of Stanger amid naked blacks and guns. Dead animals lay at his feet. Mrs. Stanger locked the door and turned with her shoes kicked off, standing shorter, flat-footed, loose in arm and shoulder, chin up to give me a level glance from slits. Her expression, face and body, said, “Go on, look, Mr. Liebowitz. I’m without my shoes and no less terrific.” There was a dull lamp in a corner of the room. Its light mixed delicate oils for metal and a breath of leather. She advanced in it slowly, face darkening, slits shining. “Don’t you dare fuck me.” We used the back of a brown bear. Her face beneath mine, in a field of bristle, opened as she opened and opened. Her hands slid up my spine, then away, up through her hair. Rings clicked on bear teeth. She fingered the fangs until they were bloody, then lay still, silent, perfectly flat, showing the indifference to my glance and the perfect ease of a woman who is proud of her body. I dressed. When I stood over her, she said, “Poor me. See the boo-boo. Lick the boo-boo, Mr. Liebowitz.” I kneeled. She fed me fingers. I licked. The mute choir of staring animals, fifty Mr. Stangers, naked blacks, instruments of pain and annihilation, dull light intimating the circles of her breasts and white shield of belly, thickening of hair and shadow at the conflation of thighs and greater labia, were in my mouth. I swallowed.

The party had mounted to its preclimactic moment, music booming, blacks winding about wheeling carts of ice, glasses, and bottles. I felt the general tension that precedes both success and failure. All could decline into scattered, desultory chitchat or fly toward community. Two men, stripped to the waist, were fighting in a corner. Some guests made a circle about them. Most were dancing, or talking in groups. I returned to the chair I had been sitting in. Black hands fixed me a bourbon; yellow; kickling ice. Through it I watched Stanger and Mildred, the intense, wishy-washy figures of an erotic urn, evoking the prick of perpetuity. Blows, grunts, incoherent curses, spiced with squeals from spectators, filled gaps in the music. The ambience was dense, rude, various flow. Blacks in tuxedos; hard black rock; whites chatting, slugging, dancing the inventions of black kids in ghettos. To think was impossible. I couldn’t have added two and two unless driven by hatred or an equivalent passion. I couldn’t have read a paragraph of Austen or James unless I shrieked each word. Mrs. Stanger remained behind to wash. I had nothing to do but sit, feel the life, watch Stanger and Mildred, drink my bourbon. Then a big wild lady plopped into Mrs. Stanger’s chair. Her dress was channeled to discover tits, her talk was electrified by topics of slick magazines — decadent New York, divorce, the problems so many had these days with kids. She mentioned grass raps, politics, syphilis, runaways, and said, “I used to play kissing games, but today a kid spots a hair on his crotch and runs out to fuck.” She waited for my comment. I grinned agreement. Between her tits the stream of little hair was bleached. Her own kid, she said, making a bomb, had blown out his eye. “Blew it out,” she sneered, as if amazed at his incompetence. My head shook sympathetically while inside — along with the tiger haunted by former ass and thigh — I added first-class eats, marijuana, servants, and the job, say twenty thousand. “Blew it out,” she repeated, encouraging me to respond. I tried for a sexual-philosophical tone. “There is nothing left not to do, is there?” She looked puzzled and annoyed, as if, despite blatant tits and endless mouth, she hated double messages. “I mean, you know, make bombs. Fuck. What have you.” The men fighting had begun to shout. One claimed the other had kicked him in the balls, which was against the rules. Then the blows were thicker and louder. Tits laughed, slapped her hand lightly on my face, and gave it a little push, the way one treats a naughty child. Affectionate repudiation. “You’re a gas,” she said, her hand lingering on my lips, but sensing a prior claim, she withdrew it. Mrs. Stanger had appeared and stood looking down at us. I tried to keep the tits sitting by turning my back slightly to Mrs. Stanger. But the tits, unnerved, rose from the chair and turned her ass to me, as though displaying another pair of tits in departure. Mrs. Stanger reassumed her chair. I leaned toward her in humble admiration and squeezed her thigh. “I wanna marijuana, Mrs. Stanger.”