Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

Jimmy sits at his typewriter high on cocaine, smiling, shaking his head. He says, “I’m so good I don’t even have to write.” He’s six foot three and charcoal brown, the color of a Burmese cat. His chest is high and wide. From neck to belt he is a hard, flat wall. No hips. Apple ass. Long legs. Long hands and feet. He looks as good in clothes as he looks naked. In two senses, clothes become his body. A woman said he is so clearly a man he could wear a dress. He sits at his typewriter, smiling, shaking his head, his long, beautiful hands turned up, lying open and loose in his lap. There is nothing wrong with him. He doesn’t even have to write.

Evelyn had something to tell me, needed my opinion, I must come right away. She said she had met a famous writer. “He got the Pulitzer Prize.” I say that’s nice, so what? She says he asked her to do something. I say what? She can’t say. Oh, come on. Really, what? I know you want to tell me, so tell me. “Please,” she begs. “Please don’t do this to me. You’re my friend. I feel soiled. It was so disgusting.” She drops her head, takes her hair in her fists. I say what? what? what? She just can’t say it. Suddenly she screams, “I mean I was flattered, but he’s over seventy. He told me to phone him when I go East this Christmas, he’s in the National Academy, the Hall of Fame, everything, but what should I do? How can I phone him? I can’t.”

“Tell him you’re pregnant.”

“Tell him I’m pregnant? I’ll say,‘Your friendship means more to me than anything, but I’m pregnant, so I can’t do it, I want to do it, but I’m liable to vomit. I can’t even look at a pizza.”’

Kafka imagines a man who has a hole in the back of his head. The sun shines into this hole. The man himself is denied a glimpse of it. Kafka might as well be talking about the man’s face. Others “look into it.” The most public, promiscuous part of his body is invisible to himself. How obvious. Still, it takes a genius to say that the face, the thing that kisses, sneezes, whistles, and moans is a hole more private than our privates. You retreat from this dreadful hole into quotidian blindness, the blindness of your face to itself. You want to light a cigarette or fix yourself a drink. You want to make a phone call. To whom? You don’t know. Of course you don’t. You want to phone your face. The one you’ve never met. Who you are.

Jimmy says he met a woman at a literary conference in Miami. They spent the night talking and smoking marijuana in his hotel room. They read their stories to each other. He says he had a great time. Never touched once. The talk was so good. Later it came to him — he doesn’t know why — that was no woman. That was a man. He saw her the next day. He wanted to ask but he couldn’t think how to put it. “Hey, man, are you a man?” Either way, her feelings would be hurt. He snaps his fingers, claps, says, “That is the trouble with women, you dig?”

Plato says the face is a picture of the soul. Could this be true? I thought how noses, teeth, ears, and eyes — in the faces of Evelyn’s ancestors — flowing through the centuries, had combined to make the picture of her soul. But then she had her teeth fixed and her ears pinned back. A face is more like a word than like a picture. It has a sort of etymology. Ancient meanings, drawn from the experience of races, from geography and weather, from flora and fauna, collect in a face just as meanings collect in a word. In Evelyn’s face, I saw the travels of Marco Polo, the fall of Constantinople, the irredentist yearnings of Hungaro — Romanians. How many ancestors vanished when Evelyn had her teeth fixed? In Evelyn’s face I saw the hordes of Genghis Khan invading Poland. Among them was a yellow brute, with a long mustache flowing away from his nostrils like black ribbons. He raped Evelyn’s great-great-great-grandmother with his fierce prick, thereby giving a distinctly slanted plane to Evelyn’s cheekbones, her nicest feature.

I’m in Boris’s living room. He fixed me a drink. We sit in chairs facing each other. His girlfriend prepares dinner. I’m grateful for the comfort, the prospect of dinner with them. I’ve brought a bottle of wine, but it’s hardly enough. I must give of myself, something personal, something real. None of us has long enough to live for yet another civilized conversation. Boris waits, enjoying the wine. He looks peaceful. Perhaps the book he is writing is going well, but I don’t ask. A book is a tremendous project of excruciating difficulty; sacred business. Thomas Mann lit candles before he began to write. Kafka imagined huge spikes below his desktop which would drive into his knees. To ask Boris if his book is going well would be like asking if he writes with a pencil or a pen. I tell Boris I’m still working on the screenplay. I hope that makes him feel good, superior to me. A screenplay is a low order of writing, nothing compared to a book.

He says, “Don’t be ashamed. Movies are the most important art form of our day.” As always, he’s brilliantly penetrating. I am embarrassed, confused. I wanted to say something real, but offered a species of fraudulence. He saw through it. I can’t stop now. I tell him the work is torture, hours and hours of typing, though it is relieved by flights to New York and L.A., fine hotels and good restaurants, the company of celebrities, actors, whores.

Boris says,“I don’t want to hear about it.”

The pleasant noise from the kitchen, where his girlfriend cooks, comes to a stop. She overheard us. Women have superb ears. In the deepest sleep, they can hear a baby crying. She appears in the living room, saying, “We’re going to have the most delicious crab that ever lived.”

I say, “What do you mean you don’t want to hear about it?”

She says, “Boris only means …” but he raises his hand, cuts her short. Then he says, “I just don’t want to hear about it, that’s all. Fuck it.”

I’m yelling now, “Well, what the fuck do you want to hear about?”

“How about my book?” he shouts. “You never fucking ask about my book.”

The woman started doing it again, scratching at her neck. It was difficult to ignore. Her neck was reddish near the collar, almost bloody. I tried to look elsewhere, but I lectured in confusion and finally dismissed the class early. Amid the rush of students, I stopped her.

“Miss Toiler, do you notice how students chew gum and writhe in their seats?”

“You must see everything.”

“I do,” I said, pressing her with my look, urging her silently to understand, to leap from the general to the particular. I stood close to her, too close, but she appeared comfortable, receptive. Her blue eyes were light as her hair, the pupils dark and flat. Her hair was exceptionally fine, several shades below blond. Something in me relaxed, grew still, gazing, desiring nothing. It didn’t matter, suddenly, that she scratched at her neck. She was in her late twenties, older than most of my students. They were gone now, the hallway empty. I could speak to the point. Nobody would overhear.

“You’re not from California, are you?”

Thus, no point. I had changed the subject I never raised, and then I asked if she’d like to have coffee.

“We arrived this summer,” she said. “My husband took a job with an engineering firm in Palo Alto.”

Her gray wool suit and black shoes were wrong for the hot September morning. Her creamy silk blouse, also too warm, was sealed high on her neck by a cameo, obscuring scratches she had inflicted on herself. She looked correct in an East Coast way, insulated by propriety.

“Stanton is a geologist and an engineer.”

I imagined a tall Stanton, then no — average height, or maybe a short man with a lust for power, or, like her black shoes, officious and priestly. I knew nothing. My mind swung around the periphery of concern, like my spoon in the coffee cup.