Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

X tells Y. Y repeats it to W and thus betrays X. The moment of telling, for X, felt like prayer, almost sanctified. He thinks the betrayal was evil, but evil lay in the telling, in daring to assume one could.

Spoke to her on the phone. She cried. Said she missed me. I feel like a ghoul wandering in the darkness.

The secretary said a long goodbye. A minuscule flake of mucus, like a fish scale, trembled in her right nostril. Her face shone with cosmetic oils, as in feverish sweating. I thought she loved me, and I was reluctant to meet her eyes. I could have kissed her, perhaps changed her life, made her a great pianist, or poet, or tennis star, kissing her every day.

Eddie says he wanted to run out into the street, grab the first person he saw, and tell that person everything. He wanted to tell everything to anybody. But he picked up the phone and dialed his girlfriend. When she said hello, the sweetness of her voice, which had always pleased him, enraged him. He spoke with strenuously deliberate slowness, as if to a very stupid person, as he told her about the burning sensation he felt that morning when he pissed. She made no comment, asked no question. She understood what he was getting at. With the same slowness, he continued to speak to her, now offering an analysis of her character, saying things she would never forget, frightening even to him when he thought later about what he’d said. She said, when he let her speak, “You didn’t get it from me.” He heard the pressure of feeling in her voice, and he knew that she wanted to say much more, but she could only manage to repeat, “You didn’t get it from me.” Then she hung up. Eddie phoned her again immediately, still angry but already regretful, and no less wretched, probably, than she. She wouldn’t pick up the receiver. This struck him as unjust, but what could he do? He went into the next room. His wife, sitting at her desk, was writing a letter. She looked so much involved in her letter that Eddie was reluctant to say anything to her, but he couldn’t be silent. The very sound of his voice, as he began, struck him as criminal, a violation of their peaceful domestic order. He was deeply ashamed as he said, “I have an infection.” He was about to tell her about his girlfriend, but she thrust herself away from her desk, rushed toward him, sank to her knees, and clutched his legs. “I betrayed you,” she said. “I betrayed you in every possible way.” Eddie says it wasn’t simply her confession that appalled him. It was the strangeness of her emotion and the way she begged, “Forgive me, forgive me.” The words came from far away, like sounds in the night, as though he and she had nothing in common, only the darkness, and there couldn’t even be anything to forgive.

His neck was as thick as his head, and he had long heavy arms. His hands were stained black in the creases and in the cusp of his fingernails. Beside him stood a pale girl about nine years old. Too clean and pretty to be his daughter, but they had the same flat, grim expression and whenever he moved she moved. She was his daughter. They didn’t talk to each other, didn’t look at each other. He finished his business at the counter and turned to go. She turned to go. She walked step by step beside him out the door and into the parking lot. They looked sad. A brutalized man; a pale girl. As I watched them through the glass windows of the door, the man whirled suddenly, sweeping up the girl in his tremendous arms. She screamed. My heart bulged, as though I had to act quickly to save her, but her scream changed from terror to delight. My heart dissolved. That man would die for her. She hugged his monstrous neck. Would she find such love again?

Eddie invited his soon-to-be-former wife and her lover, a guy with two kids, over to his place for dinner. He cooked a duck, prepared a garden salad, and built a fire. They sat watching it after dinner, sipping cognac. His wife and her lover stayed the night. Eddie’s house is big, lots of extra rooms. He says they talked for hours, but something was wrong. He keeps thinking about it. “I don’t know,” he says, “something was wrong.” I laugh. He laughs, too, but I can tell he doesn’t know what’s funny.

I talk to Annette only on the phone. Afraid we might touch.

Henry is talking and eating a turkey sandwich. A piece of turkey falls out of his sandwich onto the floor. My life stops. What will he do? Something told me that he will go on talking as he picks it up and pops it into his mouth. He did exactly that. I felt we knew each other. At his funeral, I thought, I will cry.

I asked Boris to read my screenplay. Then I sat in his living room. He stood and spoke in complete sentences, built paragraphs, obliged me to read him. He wanted revenge for having done me a favor. I responded to him with laughter, dismay, surprise, assent, always appropriate and quick, feeling insulted by his concern for my edification. Other friends read it and said it isn’t good; others said it is. One said, “The best screenplay in the world can be made into a lousy movie.” Was the reverse also true? There was no truth.

Only desire and luck prevail in this world. If my screenplay isn’t good, could it be bad enough to succeed?

Boris tells me he really loves Y and he REALLY wants to fuck X. Montaigne says there is more wildness in thinking than in lust.

Whatever was wrong was wrong from the instant we met, but like kids with big eyes we plunged into eating. Later she said, “I knew it instinctively. I could feel it was wrong.” Even then she reached me, her voice speaking — beyond the words — of her. I must have the heart of a dog. I live beneath meaning.

I eat standing up, leaning over the sink. I wouldn’t eat like this if anyone could see me.

Her voice is flat and coolly distant, so I imagine things aren’t over between us.

From the woe that is in marriage has come the Iliad and ten thousand novels, but nothing from me. I missed her voice too much. After talking to her on the telephone, I turn on the radio loud.

The distance between us is neither long nor short, merely imperishable, like the sentiment in an old song.

A huge fellow with the face of a powerful dullard stood behind the counter. He turned for items on the shelf and I saw that his pants had slipped below his hips, where he was chopped sheer from lower back to legs. No ass to hold up his pants. His bulk pushed forward and heaved up into his chest. He had a hanging mouth and little eyes with a birdlike shine. I bought salami and oranges from him, though I no longer felt any desire to eat.

Eddie said he ran into his former wife in the street in New York, and they talked. They talked as if neither of them knew how to say nice to see you, I’m expected somewhere, goodbye, goodbye. They went to a restaurant and ate and talked some more, and they went to her apartment, and they made love. Then she said, “So why did we get divorced?” Eddie smiled at me and said, “See?” as if he were the idiot of circumstances, shlepped into pain and confusion by his cock. “You know how long I was divorced before I remarried?” he asked. “Not three days,” he said. I was sad for him and for her, and her, and her. The feeling widened like circles about a leaf fallen onto the surface of a pond.

We left Berkeley on December 14, driving south on Route 5, straight, flat road policed by aircraft. Jesse, eleven years old, twisted the radio dial searching for rock music. Ethan, fourteen, in the backseat with the luggage, was reading. For no reason, they’d begin to fight. Holding the wheel with one hand, I smacked at them with the other until they stopped. They were bored. There was nothing to see but the canal, a vein that leaked life out of Northern California into the agricultural empire of the Central Valley and beyond that into real estate from Los Angeles to Mexico.