Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

Veronica smiled in a feeble, grateful way. She liked to see me get along with the help. Ludwig said, “Dots right.”

“Ludwig has been our doorman for years, Phillip. Ever since I was a little girl.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Dots right.”

The door slid open. Veronica said, “Thank you, Ludwig.” I said, “Thank you, Ludwig.”

“Vulcum.”

“Vulcum? You mean ‘welcome’? Hey, Ludwig, how long you been in this country?”

Veronica was driving her key into the door.

“How come you never learned to talk American, baby?”

“Phillip, come here.”

“I’m saying something to Ludwig.”

“Come here right now.”

“I have to go, Ludwig.”

“Vulcum.”

She went directly to the bathroom. I waited in the hallway between Vlamincks and Utrillos. The Utrillos were pale and flat. The Vlamincks were thick, twisted, and red. Raw meat on one wall, dry stone on the other. Mrs. Cohen had an eye for contrasts. I heard Veronica sob. She ran water in the sink, sobbed, sat down, peed. She saw me looking and kicked the door shut.

“At a time like this …”

“I don’t like you looking.”

“Then why did you leave the door open? You obviously don’t know your own mind.”

“Go away, Phillip. Wait in the living room.”

“Just tell me why you left the door open.”

“Phillip, you’re going to drive me nuts. Go away. I can’t do a damn thing if I know you’re standing there.”

The living room made me feel better. The settee, the chandelier full of teeth, and the rug were company. Mr. Cohen was everywhere, a simple, diffuse presence. He jingled change in his pocket, looked out the window, and was happy he could see the park. He took a little antelope step and tears came into my eyes. I sat among his mourners. A rabbi droned platitudes: Mr. Cohen was generous, kind, beloved by his wife and daughter. “How much did he weigh?” I shouted. The phone rang.

Veronica came running down the hall. I went and stood at her side when she picked up the phone. I stood dumb, stiff as a hatrack. She was whimpering, “Yes, yes …” I nodded my head yes, yes, thinking it was better than no, no. She put the phone down.

“It was my mother. Daddy’s all right. Mother is staying with him in his room at the hospital and they’ll come home together tomorrow.”

Her eyes looked at mine. At them as if they were as flat and opaque as hers. I said in a slow, stupid voice, “You’re allowed to do that? Stay overnight in a hospital with a patient? Sleep in his room?” She continued looking at my eyes. I shrugged, looked down. She took my shirt front in a fist like a bite. She whispered. I said, “What?” She whispered again, “Fuck me.” The clock ticked like crickets. The Vlamincks spilled blood. We sank into the rug as if it were quicksand.

AT THE END OF THE SUMMER, OR THE YEAR,or when he could do more with his talent than play guitar in a Village strip joint … and after considering his talent for commitment and reluctance she found reluctance in her own heart and marriage talk became desultory, specifics dim, ghostly, lost in bed with Myron doing wrong things, “working on” her, discovering epileptic dysrhythmia in her hips, and he asked about it and she said it hurt her someplace but not, she insisted, in her head, and they fought the next morning and the next as if ravenous for intimacy and disgraced themselves yelling, becoming intimate with neighbors, and the superintendent brought them complaints which would have meant nothing if they hadn’t exhausted all desire for loud, broad strokes, but now, conscious of complaints, they thrust along the vital horizontal with silent, stiletto words, and later in the narrowed range of their imaginations could find no adequate mode of retraction, so wounds festered, burgeoning lurid weeds, poisoning thought, dialogue, and the simple air of their two-room apartment (which had seemed with its view of the Jersey cliffs so much larger than now) now seemed too thick to breathe, or to see through to one another, but they didn’t say a word about breaking up, even experimentally, for whatever their doubts about one another, their doubts about other others and the city — themselves adrift in it among messy one-night stands — were too frightening and at least they had, in one another, what they had: Sarah had Myron Bronsky, gloomy brown eyes, a guitar in his hands as mystical and tearing as, say, Lorca, though Myron’s particular hands derived from dancing, clapping Hasidim; and he had Sarah Nilsin, Minnesota blonde, long bones, arctic schizophrenia in the gray infinities of her eyes, and a turn for lyric poems derived from piratical saga masters. Rare, but opposites cleave in the divisive angularities of Manhattan and, as the dialectics of embattled individuation became more intense, these two cleaved more tightly: if Sarah, out for groceries, hadn’t returned in twenty minutes, Myron punched a wall, pulverizing the music in his knuckles, but punched, punched until she flung through the door shrieking stop; and he, twenty minutes late from work, found Sarah in kerchief, coat, and gloves, the knotted cloth beneath her chin a little stone proclaiming wild indifference to what the nighttime street could hold, since it held most for him if she were raped and murdered in it. After work he ran home. Buying a quart of milk and a pack of cigarettes, she suffered stomach cramps.

Then a letter came from St. Cloud, Minnesota. Sarah’s father was going to visit them next week.

She sewed curtains, squinting down into the night, plucking thread with pricked, exquisite fingertips. He painted walls lately punched. She bought plants for the windowsills, framed and hung three Japanese prints, and painted the hall toilet opaque, flat yellow. On his knees until sunrise four days in a row, he sanded, then varnished floorboards until the oak bubbled up its blackest grain, turbulent and petrified, and Monday dawned on Sarah ironing dresses — more than enough to last her father’s visit — and Myron already twice shaved, shining all his shoes, urging her to hurry.

In its mute perfection their apartment now had the air of a well-beaten slave, simultaneously alive and dead, and reflected, like an emanation of their nerves, a severe, hectic harmony; but it wouldn’t have mattered if the new curtains, pictures, and boiling floors yelled reeking spiritual shambles, because Sarah’s father wasn’t that kind of minister. His sermons alluded more to Heidegger and Sartre than to Christ; he lifted weights, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, drove a green Jaguar, and since the death of Sarah’s mother a year ago in a state insane asylum, had seen species of love in all human relations. And probably at this very moment, taking the banked curves of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, knuckles pale on the walnut wheel, came man and machine leaning as one toward Jersey, and beyond that toward love.

Their sense of all this drove them, wrenched them out of themselves, onto their apartment until nothing more could make it coincident with what he would discover in it anyway, and they had now only their own absolute physical being still to work on, at nine o’clock, when Myron dashed out to the cleaners for shirts, trousers, and jackets, then dressed in fresh clothing while Sarah slammed and smeared the iron down the board as if increasingly sealed in the momentum of brute work, and then, standing behind her, lighting a cigarette, Myron was whispering as if to himself that she must hurry and she was turning from the board and in the same motion hurled the iron, lunging after it with nails and teeth before it exploded against the wall and Myron, instantly, hideously understood that the iron, had it struck him, had to burn his flesh and break his bones, flew to meet her with a scream and fists banging her mouth as they locked, winding, fusing to one convulsive beast reeling off walls, tables, and chairs, with ashtrays, books, lamps shooting away with pieces of themselves, and he punched out three of her teeth and strangled her until she dissolved in his hands and she scratched his left eye blind — but there was hope in corneal transplantation that he would see through it again — and they were strapped in bandages, twisted and stiff with pain a week after Sarah’s father didn’t arrive, and they helped one another walk slowly up the steps of the municipal building to buy a marriage license.