Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“Please don’t apologize for being late and slamming through my door like the offensive pig you happen to be. I much prefer your silence. Any apology will make me exceedingly furious. I’m not exceedingly furious now, Colin. So keep your mouth shut. I suppose you haven’t shaved, have you? I won’t hear your apologies. I won’t hear your voice.”

She clapped the brush down. Her legs lashed by my face, negligee flying, to the bed. Books and papers were knocked off the bed. I stood. She flung onto the bed, twisted onto her back, eyes shut, forehead writhing with contradiction. She gave a blind, shrill order to the ceiling:

“Go on, Colin, you know what I want.”

Lest he’d forgotten, her legs struck out, stiff, isoscelean. I saw voluted conch in wire tangle, the picture of her mind. The Colin in me rose, perked up like a rat, snout quivering, pointing at the answer to a question never asked. Life is this epitome. Red, tidal maw. Yawn. Aching exfoliant. Hole. I flicked light, shut door, three steps, and I straddled her neck. “Smells,” she cried, and muddy flux dragged me, gripping my head, churning circles into the circles of her need, the cherished head which she recognized—“Who you?”—as not the right head. A good one nonetheless, already thinking how to apologize. She screeched and kicked. I pressed on to suggest the suction of feeling, but, thinking, thinking, I felt only ideas, tones, and tropes rise upon one another like waves, curling, crashing, failing to hold, sliding faster, faster down the beach to the seething, shapeless inane. Remember the job, I thought, and a hairy hemp ripped from my liver to my throat. I came at both ends simultaneously. Apology was impossible. I opted for vigor. “Fantastic,” I cried, hoping thus to distract her with vigor. Also oblique flattery She said, “Eeee,” scrambling to one end of the bed, and me to the other, pleading, “Don’t scream. I’m turning on the light.” It discovered her biting the sheet. “Woo woo woo,” she said. I bent, pleading in the harmless posture of a dog at stool. “Didn’t you like it?” She twisted about to slap the night table. I expected a gun. She twisted back, glasses on her face, big eyes, the tigerish mother apparent. “Say, you’re Nell Stanger’s kid, aren’t you?” My voice was eager, genial. She screamed. I fled.

Streaming chair, rug, jug, I whipped into the last hall, kicked into high for the heart-bursting straightaway, and a person — shortish, bald, bow tie, drink in chubby grip — was there, like the eternal child who plays in the road before the speeding Ferrari, or the peasant lifting slow, clotted, laborious face to a thunder of horses and hounds, but this particular incarnation of the common denominator leaned toward a painting, touching, smelling, wallowing in the color and texture of converging neural streams which filled the airy delta between himself and better life on the wall, and was unaware of me, running, whole man running, legs, arms, head running, stomach, knees, balls running, and he still savored the painted dream as he looked up into the oncoming real, the drink warm in his forgotten fist, all of him big, bigger in my eyes, looking up with no intention, no expectation, and before his eyebrows fully elevated, eyes fully opened, and pulpy sluggish lip curled fully away from stained teeth, my hands struck his neck. Behind me was a faint thud. Empty rumble of a rolling glass.

I reentered the drawing room with expanded lungs. Heat in my eyes. Couples were still dancing, others sprawled. Nobody watched Swoon and the other man, lugubrious with exhaustion, flailing in slow arcs, rarely hitting. Rancid breath lay in the torpid, festering air. Screams came from the distance. No cigarette was put out or drink lowered. Between me and the couch, where Stanger and Mildred sat necking, there was a forest of shifting fashions, the black tuxedos and the clothing of the guests, pinks, greens, blues, and yellows crying out for pleasures of middle age. It hummed everywhere, omnivorous conversation of a dying party that insisted on living. Nell stepped out of it. “Let’s dance.” Her voice was grim, as if dancing were war, but it had an undercurrent of something more particular. Instantly, I became a dancing fool. She danced me off to the zoo and said it.

“Undress.”

Her clothes were a heap of white, pink, and gold. She sprawled on the bear, its fangs encrusted, shining blood. Her limbs cast out in the languid shape of her mood, suggesting nets. Her voice was soft, yet coarse in tone. “Get it, Phillip. On the shelf in the closet.”

Still in my shirt and tie I trotted to the closet to get it, whatever it was. On a shelf about chest high lay three hundred sausages, coiled in convoluted complications, a monster brain. A long gray iron chain. The prospect of such appetite suffused me with feelings of poverty, no education, and moral shock, but in one clean movement of self — disgust I laid on hands like he who knows. The chain chuckled as my fingers pierced its holes. I pulled. It came slowly, heavily, as each link stirred from sleep, and then too heavily, gaining speed, personal will, clamor, a raging snake of cannonballs pouring through my hands to bury my feet, shins, knees. Writhing, arms out, I was half man, half bonsai tree with impoverished roots, strangled in its springs, sucking denial. “I hate pain,” I screamed. Nell bobbled up off the bear. She seized the chain, tugged. I pummeled the top of her head. For real, not in a sexual way. She said, “Quit that.” I shouted sincerely, “I hate pain. I’ll beat your head off,” pummeling. She lugged; steady, patient strength; the motion of serious, honest work. In different conditions, I’d have considered it beautiful; her naked, multidimpled back, rippling, heaving spine against iron. I beat the measure of her lugging into her head and shouted my refrain. At last I fell free and could properly convulse. She rolled onto me, tried to soothe me with mothery tongue, breasts, and holes, but something had happened to make me unreceptive, inconsolable, as if my body, in trauma, had shaken free of my mind, and now my eyes, my flesh in every place retreated, fleeing toward the murdered buffalo, gazelle, and giraffe. “That,” I gasped, “rub with that.” She, too, seemed unselved, brained. She rose, stumbling across the room to grab the giraffe by the nostrils and tear it off the wall. She returned, kneeled, rubbed its eyes and great slop of lip carefully, gently, against my face and neck, then back and forth between my legs until I felt better. I dressed rapidly. She stared, sitting on the floor beside the giraffe, a limp, naked, stupid woman. I let myself think of her that way. “Get dressed, woman.” She crawled to the heap of clothing and clawed out her underpants. I left for the drawing room. Not once had I struck her in a deliberate and evil way. I thought of that as I limped down the hall. I felt myself ringing like a bell that calls men from this world. For the first time that evening, if not in my life, doing nothing, I’d done tremendously. Though nothing definite had been said, I knew the job was mine. It was inconceivable that it wasn’t mine. I hadn’t hit her. I hadn’t even wanted to. In the force of not wanting, I’d made the job mine. This wasn’t magical thinking. This was true; or the world was chaos and less than hell. Nevertheless, I was prepared to accept a word, a strong hint. I didn’t need legal forms, a ten-page contract, sixteen carbons. I would approach Stanger now. The confrontation would be his chance to talk, not mine. I had the job. He had only, for his salvation, to confirm it, suggest an idea of wages per annum. My limp deepened. I deepened it. Hard, good lunge. Dragging foot. An arm hooked back for balance, for the feel of bad damage swinging itself, dragging, lunging down the hall. What rough beast? What rough beast, indeed.