Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“You can begin calling me Nell. Why do you want a marijuana? Didn’t you like fucking me?”

Her expression was imperious. Her voice was irascible.

“I see no connection.”

“There is one. Answer my question, Phillip. Didn’t you like it?”

“I didn’t like it, Nell.”

“Are you being moral?”

“My only luxury.”

“A luxury of poor, sad, uneducated people. I liked it very much. Perhaps you’re more fussy than moral.”

She made an amused eyebrow and leaned back in the theater of great class.

“I’m sure my husband may give you the job.”

I forgot that she wheezed and didn’t sweat right. She saw that in my face. Fresh color leaped into her bronze, as if to meet some gift I held. She was ready again. So was I, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t predict tomorrow’s feelings if I allowed no forbearance. A man needn’t be immoral to know that. He feels things. Her hand on mine. We stood up together. Pretending to dance, we drifted toward the zoo, both of us quivering with the nastiness of our exchange. Sobs issued from the corner. Blows persisted. She said, “One of those chaps is a plastic surgeon.”

“Which?”

I asked the question in a quiet, natural voice, like hers, to seem as ready as she for anything, even conversational drivel. And I turned her slightly to face the corner. “Which one?”

“The bigger one. His name is Swoon. I’ll introduce you, if you like. I’ve never seen him at a party where he doesn’t fight.”

“You’ve invited him here before?”

“God, yes. About fifty times. You and your wife are the only ones never here before. He killed a man in that corner. February. Yes, it was February.”

“Curious name.”

“Silly. I mean he killed him in February.”

She kissed my cheek. Stanger and Mildred receded through hair, vapors of perfume, alcohol, and cigarettes, immobilized figures on the couch, begging for trouble. In the zoo I buggered Nell. She noticed smears, said, “Shit,” and ran off to change.

Nothing definite had been said about the job, but I was doing all right. Swoon, on the other hand, was down, spinning on his back while the other man, with pointed shoes, kicked him in the face, skipped away, stopped, kicked him in the face again, and skipped away. A lady with bulging eyes and tendons scoring her neck shouted, “Get up, Jack, get up. Get up, you fairy.” Beyond the fight, through agitations of dancing couples, I saw his hand on her thigh. She offered semiparted lips, lick of bare leg, pure neck and arm, and inflexible attention to him. She was lovely all in all. To me, a stranger. I’d have fucked her myself, though the idea seemed unnatural. She was mother of my child, not lady of this glory. However unnatural, I wanted her and envied her. I wondered how long before I was homosexual by circumstance. “Didn’t you want me to do it, Phillip?” That they hadn’t once left the couch was proof they felt something. “I did it for your job.”

“No lies. Just tell me if you liked it.”

“He was revolting. An old man.”

“That means you liked it.”

Swoon suddenly seized the dancer’s crotch and dragged himself up through seven or eight punches in the face. The move was brilliant and courageous. I found myself shouting, “Go, baby. Kill. Kill. Kill.” A voice hissed into my ear, “Devil.” In another dress, another degree of fresher, whiter person, Nell smiled, then pinched at my kidney, screwing the flesh until I thrust an elbow into her abdomen. I giggled and tried not to look at the fight or across the room at dirty Mildred. To my giggles, shifting, and lack of focus, Nell said, “The toilet is that way” I said, “Thanks,” wondering if I had to piss. She smiled, and her smile deepened, taking knowledge of her devil into places she’d taken the man. She knew him, this devil: he had to piss. In fact he didn’t, but he smiled, too, at her periodontal plastic, pink, low in the gleaming tooth. As I started away she grabbed my elbow.

“Tell me one thing.”

The fighting and the music were loud. I gave her a steady, deaf look.

“I want you to tell me one thing before you go.” She didn’t stop smiling.

“It was all right, Nell.”

“But?”

I waited to see what she made of nothing.

Her smile strained as if tugged by waters. “You’d like to beat me, wouldn’t you? I think you’d like to beat me.”

I winked.

The other man went down. Swoon was grinding a heel into his neck. People were cheering, calling his name. “Jack. Jack.” That was love, waves of love. Nell clasped her hands on her breast and jumped up and down. “Oh, kill, kill,” she said. “Make him be dead.”

Like a child, a little girl. Yet her exquisite jumping epitomized the party, spoke for the fighting men, and the others, too, even the servants. They served, danced, fought for the lady in white and gold, of the symmetrical face. The spot where she pinched me seemed to burn a message into my kidney. Her crowd wasn’t made of phonies. Between desire and action they interposed no mask. Impulse didn’t twist into perversion, into games. They were whole, straight, noble creatures, slave and master. To me, the challenge they represented left no alternatives. Maybe Stanger and Mildred had seen to that, but I was glad that I’d made the first deadly stroke, going to the zoo with Nell, killing Mildred as surely as Stanger killed giraffes. I imagined him on the veldt, amid naked blacks who hand him gun after gun, begging him to shoot straight as the giraffe charges. Great, but I’d buggered his wife. I’d wanted the job. Now, I could not not have it. Something definite would be said tonight. Yes or no. Either answer would be a comment on myself. Before the evening was over I’d be purged of irony. Made clean. Hired. Or a simple schmuck. I’d walked off in the direction indicated by Nell. My step was light. Too light, nearly wraithlike in the spacious, winding substance of this apartment. It made me feel weak and sick, the apartment, the creepy trivial way I walked in it. Like a man looking for his own pathetic step on a huge ship at sea. A man who has never seen or felt a high sea, never learned to walk its long surge, its remorseless drag and lunge. I needed this moment away from the blazing, loud incoherence of the crowded land, alone, out of sight, to practice walking. And my feelings, while practicing, were like those of a young captain in a novel by Conrad. First opportunity to command. He is alone, pacing the deck, getting a sense of himself. A storm is rising on the horizon. Members of the crew try to call it to his attention, but he has already noticed it, and seen through it to himself. He is sympathetic to their fears, yet more sympathetic to his own. Could I get at that sense of myself required by this storm? I notice it’s a moral storm. The worst kind. The ship is fraught with goods meant for the best people. Could I bring it home intact? Was I the captain? I tried to walk right. One, two, three, six, fifteen … It wasn’t easy to walk right. No prerequisite of honor is easy. I was afraid I might kick a jug, scratch a painting, the way I walked, like a crazy, spastic, stoned, drunken gawk. Not a captain. I might even fall off the whole fucking ship. But then I felt it begin: one, two, three, four … I was walking, and all right. I was the captain.

A hallway led to hallways, to rooms opening into rooms, a labyrinth, a weight of money, accumulating in vistas of paintings, etchings, hanging rugs, pewter, throbbing lacquers, silver, gold. Touch these good things, I thought. Let sublimation steel you. Touch. Let lech. Love any hole that feels. I smacked a door, hands flat to spare me a broken nose, and fell through onto my face. I looked up moments later and saw a girl at a dressing table. Her back was to me. She was brushing long brown hair, like the household genie of serene indifference. She didn’t seem to know or care that I lay behind her on the floor, watching. She spoke: