Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“I’ll stop when you tell me. Just don’t say ‘stop.’ That only excites me. Say ‘tomato’ or something.”

Deborah wants to have her eyes fixed so they’ll look like white eyes and she hates her landlady who gave her the Etna Street apartment, choosing her over 157 other applicants. Her landlady assumed Deborah is a good girl, clean and quiet. “A Japanese angel,” says Deborah with a sneer. I was shocked by her racism. I hadn’t imagined that she thought of herself as Japanese. She showed me photos of her family. Mother, father, brothers, sister — all Japanese, but I hadn’t supposed she thought she was, too. What the hell did I imagine? Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxury that makes you deeply stupid.

Deborah holds a new blouse up to her chin, tilts her head, and says, “Do you like this blouse?” I look at it and at her, how she’s tilted her head so seriously, waiting for my opinion, but I can’t speak. She sees what’s happening and lowers the blouse. Her head remains tilted like an iris on the fine white stalk of her neck. She whispers, as if there were someone else in the room, “You’re hopeless. You’re like my girlfriend. I ask if she likes what I’m wearing and she says, ‘You’re beautiful.’”

Margaret says she went to Cesar’s Latin Palace and stood at the bar until some guy asked her to dance, a handsome Jamaican. Great dancer. She says there’s a divorced couple at Cesar’s who will not have anything to do with each other, except when they show up Saturday night and dance together, drawn to the music in each other’s body. When the number ends they separate instantly, without a word, and go to different tables. They’d rather drink with strangers. Then the great Francisco Aquabella starts slapping conga drums, driving the whole world to cha-cha-cha, and she feels the need for him, that one, the guy over there across the floor sitting with the white bitch, that one who is standing up and crossing the floor to her table, and she is standing up, too, even before he asks her to dance, feeling the music in his body. Don’t talk to me about love. Talk about cha-cha-cha, and the way he touches her. His eyes are cold, yet full of approval. When they dance, they belong to each other and nothing else matters until the music ends.

Kittredge loves pretty women, but he is blind, can’t pursue them. So I take him to a party and describe a woman in the room. He whispers, “Tell me about her neck.” Eventually I introduce him to her. They leave the party together. Kittredge is always successful. Women think he listens differently from other men. In his blind hands they think pleasure is truth. Blind hands know deep particulars, what yearns in neck and knee. Women imagine themselves embracing Kittredge the way sunlight takes a tree. He says, “Talk about her hips.”As I talk, his eyes slide with meanings, like eyes in a normal face except quicker, a snapping in them. Kittredge cannot see, cannot know if a woman is pretty. I say, “She has thick black hair.” When they leave together I begin to sink. I envy the magnetic darkness of my friend. To envy him without desiring his condition is possible.

Evelyn told me that Sally, her dearest friend—“Don’t ever repeat this!”—came down with the worst case of herpes the doctor had ever seen.

Evelyn’s four-year-old son had a nightmare in which Evelyn appeared with a big knife stuck in her head. She has scheduled him for psychotherapy five days a week.

Margaret says she went back to Cesar’s. The Jamaican asked her to dance again. She refused. She liked him, but she kept a closed face. If she showed interest, he’d think she was in the same mood as last time. They would dance, then go out to his car and make love. She said, “I have a Ph.D. I can do anything. I can even read fashion magazines. He’s a nice guy, but he’d never understand me.”

Deborah’s dentist, a little Jewish man, talks incessantly and she can’t say a word because her mouth is pried open, under investigation by steel instruments, and also hooked like a fish by a suction tube. Nevertheless, her dentist says things that require an answer, so she grunts and moans to say yes, no, really, how nice, too bad. Last time she saw him he carried on about Buddhism, which he studies with monks in a temple. He said, incidentally, that he’d learned to levitate. When he finished working, Deborah could talk. She asked if he meant “meditate” rather than “levitate.” He said, “No. I meant levitate.” She asked him to show her. He said, “No, no.” She pleaded with him. He refused. She refused to leave. He said, “Just once.” He turned his back to her, crouched slightly, and lifted off the floor. I waited for Deborah to continue, but that was the end. She had no more to say. I snapped at her, “He did not levitate.” She said, truly astonished, “He didn’t?”

Evelyn goes shopping Monday through Sunday. Clothes, jewelry, books, records, prints, paintings, ceramics. Her house of many things shrieks good taste. The latest dress style isn’t always right for Evelyn, but she is the first in town to wear it. She believes her clothing and her automobile say something about her. After shopping, Evelyn feels she’s done good. She must know she is too wide for a zebra-striped dress, but still, it’s the most new thing, and it gives her moral sensations to wear it with bright red socks, her black pearl necklace, and a wide aluminum belt. All of it is hidden under her black cape, which she throws off in the restaurant, driving the women in the place mad with envy.

Margaret doesn’t like oral sex because she was once forced to do it at gunpoint, in a car, in the parking lot next to the railroad tracks, outside the bar where the guy picked her up. I wish she hadn’t told me. I hear freight trains. I see people coming out of the bar, laughing, drunk, going to their cars while she crouches in misery and fear, the gun at her head. How easy, if I had the gun at his head, to pull the trigger.

Eddie calls her Stop-and-Go. She’s up early and moving, then collapses into hours of marijuana. It’s like everything with her, he says. No degrees. Truth or lies, good or bad, stop or go. She criticizes Eddie constantly. He can’t do anything right. He wants to break up, but plans to provoke her into doing it by hanging a picture she doesn’t like in a place she finds disturbing. They’ve already argued about that. He took the picture down, but he plans now to put it up again. She’ll see that he is saying the house is his. She’ll go. He says she becomes affectionate after a fight. He finds her adorable then. He says she dislikes his father for his Jewish traits, and also dislikes Eddie for his. He says she doesn’t even know what they are, then smiles in a silly way, as if he weren’t really offended. Tomorrow her mood will be different. She’ll forget what she said today. Her feelings aren’t moored to anything, no important work, like his medical practice, for example. He is accomplished; successful. The woman is merely herself, except when she objects to him. He thinks it costs him nothing and it makes her feel real. He says, “Let me ask you something. You and me, we’ve had dinner together a couple of hundred times. Is there anything about how I eat that looks to you Jewish?”

“Is that what she thinks?”

“How I eat, how I dress, how I talk, how I fuck.”

I laugh.

“O.K. She doesn’t treat me well,” he says. “She disapproves of me. Criticism is my daily bread. But I’m never lonely with her, never bored. I’m miserable. But this word ‘miserable,’ in my case, is not the end of the discussion. It’s only the beginning. There are kinds of misery …”

Feelings swarm in Eddie’s face, innumerable nameless nuances, like lights on the ocean beneath a sky of racing clouds. Eddie could have been a novelist or a poet. He has emotional abundance, fluency of self. He’s shameless.