Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“I’m not crying.”

“Yes, you are. I’m tired. Let’s take a cab all the way home. We can afford it. He said twenty-five. With his paw on my ass, he says twenty-five. ‘Twenty-five, dear.’ Jealous? Mrs. Stanger digs you. You should fuck her or something, if you haven’t already. I hate you.”

“You acted badly.”

“I’m sorry I acted badly. There’s a cab. Kiss me. Tomorrow I’ll buy three pairs of shoes.”

I kissed her in the cab, then asked, “Did you like Stanger’s paw on your ass?”

“I liked the way you told me to get my coat in front of everybody. But if you ever do that when we’re with human beings, Phillip, I’ll do something you won’t forget. Twenty-five. Hee-hee.”

“Yeah.”

The cab went west to Third Avenue, then north, then west through Central Park. The trees, lacerated by lights, seemed to fly into the cab and about our heads. Mildred leaned back, giving herself to the trees and to me. Her pants tangled at the ankle, but I couldn’t get it out of mind and up again for naked traffic until she whispered, sliding down to the floor, whispering “Twenty-five” into my crotch. “Kootchie-kootchie.” At our place the driver waited, a head on a leather jacket, smoke sliding and twining up like hair from his invisible cigarette, and the whole cab shuddering in idle. His photo looked down at us in the back, smiling; Nunzio Salazar, machismo-fascismo mustache, number 999327, approves of it. Mildred’s legs seemed to lift from my ribs like wings. She said, “Oh,” and came. I was satisfied. A sentimental man prefers happiness to truth. I did prefer it. Her dear, lovely cheek on my shoulder as I fingered sticky leaves, peeling away singles for the fare, twice as many for the tip. Mildred jerked. “Don’t be a fool. We live in this town.” Half as many for the tip.

THE WOMAN SAID THAT HER HUSBANDphoned her at her lover’s apartment. She had to ask him to repeat himself.

“I want you to come home and collect your clothes.”

She’d been conscious of his pain before then, but in a general way. She’d have said, if you asked, “He doesn’t feel good. He cries.” He was sobbing like a child on the telephone. To her lover, she’d confessed, “I feel guilty for not feeling guilty.” She could virtually see her dresses and shoes in the bedroom closet. She hurried home. Her husband locked the door and beat her up. “Did you do it with him in the toilet?” he said, and forced her to do it there with him, too. The same for every room in the house. “It really happened,” she said, laughing at herself. “Saved my marriage. You’d think I could write about that. Not moral. Just a story.”

We reviewed the events. “You told your husband about the other man and named him?” Already, to my mind, a failed marriage. Her husband should have known her body, guessed there was another man. Smells change. Besides, her love affair should have reached him in how she gave herself. “Where did you learn to do that?” He never asked.

He made nothing of her luminous moods or impatience with him. “How many times have I told you to put the cap back on the toothpaste tube?” Even her revulsion at the shape of his feet didn’t strike him as a curious development. She imitated him muttering, shaking his head: “That’s how they always looked.” He made nothing of his own malaise. Simply didn’t know why he’d become that way. Never supposed it was because his wife had a lover. He’d had to be told about him. The poor man’s suffering exceeded his understanding. He beat her up. He didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t do nothing.

“But it really happened,” she said again, laughing moronically at herself. “Maybe I’ll try to write it as a poem.”

Another woman at the literary conference, drawn forth by the story, said her husband accused her of sleeping with his best friend. The accusations began at breakfast and resumed at night when he returned from work. He ruined her nicest dinners. He ruined her sleep. All her efforts to make them happy — she “really tried”—were turned ugly by his suspiciousness. She insisted on seeing a marriage counselor. He didn’t want to, but she said the marriage was over if he didn’t agree to counseling. Marriage counseling did no good. Her husband wouldn’t discuss “real problems.”

“Were you?” I asked.

“What?”

“You know. Were you fucking his friend?”

“Yes, but that’s not the point.”

She lifted her hands, fingers bent to suggest hard labor.

“I cleaned. I cooked. I washed his filthy hairs out of the bathtub.”

There was nothing anyone could say. The point was she cleaned and cooked. She washed the bathtub.

In the emptiness, I remembered how I used to meet a woman, on Sunday mornings, behind her church. I waited in my car, in the shade of a low-hanging willow, until the service was over. Then she would appear, striking across the steamy asphalt of the parking lot in her high heels and dark blue churchgoing suit, a white flower in the lapel. She looked magnificent, yet my car was good enough; all we needed. When she talked of God, her cloud of hair floated in a blonder light. Once, she surprised me, her voice reproachful, “Same damn thing all the time,” as if I’d done something bad. But it was her fiance, not me. She said he’d made a gruesome scene, shrieking at her in a crowded oyster bar, “You sucked another man’s cock.”

I started to kiss her. She thrust me back, making me see how pity mixed with pain in her eyes. “Can you believe he said that to me? All those people sitting there eating oysters. Can you imagine how I felt?” I nodded yes, yes, needing to kiss her, but she wanted me to wait, to let the sacred fullness of her sorrow sink into me. She wanted me to feed on her immensely beseeching stare, prim blue suit, little flower in the lapel. I pressed her backward. She tucked up her skirt and her thighs flashed in the shady car. The pretty church danced beyond the willow. Her fiance, far away, suffering … It should matter, but in the pitch of things there is no should.

“You’re greedy,” she said.

I asked her to marry me.

Her lips moved against my cheek, as if I were a deaf child, each word a touching pressure. “You know,” she whispered, “I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket. The cop looks at me and can’t seem to write it. When they start writing me tickets, ask again.”

She saved me from myself, but why did I want her? She was only ten years older than my son. He’d have started smoking dope; run away.

“Can you believe my fiance said that to me?”

Her question passed like the shadow of a bird through my heart.

Beard wrote to me saying he’d heard there was “bad blood” between us. We’d met only two or three times. As far as I knew, there was hardly anything between us. But I answered his letter, impelled by guilt, though I could imagine nothing to feel guilty about. I didn’t dislike the man. I felt nothing, had no opinions, yet I was now going about mysteriously oppressed, concerned for his feelings and also burdened by weird apprehensions. You couldn’t simply live your life in society. No, others noticed you. Others demanded that you notice them, welcome them in your life somehow. Simply to breathe incurred responsibilities. Then, after my letter arrived, came the phone calls. We tried to make a date for lunch. Beard didn’t want to come to Berkeley. I didn’t want to go to San Francisco. He said if he came to Berkeley, I’d pay for lunch. If I came to San Francisco, he’d pay. Again guilt. Which did he prefer? Which do I prefer? I said I’d go to him. It was difficult to find a place to park, then I had to walk five blocks to his apartment house. I felt I was surely paying for something, though I didn’t know what. He answered the door with a letter in his hand. For an instant, I supposed it was a letter for me. He asked if I’d like something to drink. I said, “No, let’s go to lunch.” On our way out to lunch, he said that he’d written a letter of condolence to the wife of a friend, a famous writer who had just died. He said it was easy for him to write the letter, having had to write so many of them lately. He flipped it into a mailbox. We ate in a local restaurant. Since he was paying, I ordered only soup, salad, and a glass of wine. That would seem enough like lunch without seeming expensive. He left the table several times before and after the food arrived to talk to women at other tables and the bar. Walking back to his apartment, he told me about a time when he didn’t write a letter of condolence to a certain wife. He didn’t like her, he said. This woman’s husband had been a good friend and also a famous writer. She’d been sexually unfaithful to him with his friends. She taunted him with it, made him feel despised and lonely. Finally he died. Beard didn’t write to her. Soon afterward, she phoned Beard and asked why he hadn’t writen her a letter, or at least called her. It was the middle of the night. She was drunk. She raved about the many letters of condolence she had received. Everybody of importance in the literary world, publishers, editors, writers, had written her. Why not Beard? I thought it was a good story and asked if I could have it. He looked puzzled. He hadn’t thought the story was anything special. Now he wondered. He was reluctant to say I could have it. Again guilt: I had enjoyed the story too much, I felt I understood something more than he intended. As he spoke, I’d seen the woman raving drunkenly into the phone at Beard. I could almost hear her voice. I supposed Beard had fucked her, but that wasn’t interesting. I was seeing her pain. At his apartment, he asked if I’d like coffee or wine. I chose wine. I noticed, as he poured the wine, that the glass was caked at the bottom with black dregs and there was a smear of lipstick on the rim. I supposed, when he handed me the wine in the filthy glass, he intended nothing hostile, because the whole apartment seemed never to have been cleaned. The fabric of his couch and chairs carried a greasy film, the windows were dull and blurry with greasiness, and the air smelled of dust mixed with the sweetness of decaying fruit. Something else, a faint yet penetrating sour smell, like what rises from the neglected litter box of cats. I saw no cats, but there was cat hair on the rug. Later, as we stood together in the narrow hallway to his door, saying goodbye, assuring each other there was no bad blood, he farted. The tight space became noxiously suffocating. Eager to get out, I said for perhaps the third time, “There is no bad blood,” which was the thing “between us” we’d not once mentioned, though it was the reason for my visit. He said, as though it hadn’t ever really mattered, “A puff of smoke.”