Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“Believe me, I’m not a faithful type. I’ve slept with a hundred women. More. But it’s no use. She hits me, curses me. She says, ‘I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be turned on.’ No matter. It begins to happen. She relaxes, lets me disgrace myself. She tells me,‘Lick the insides of my legs while I make this phone call.’ My father slaved six days a week, year after year, to put me through medical school. For me to do this, to lick this woman, he went to an early grave.”

The paper was thick and creamy, textured like baby flesh. Every night she opened to a new page, wrote the date, then “Dear Diary,” then thought for a minute, then quit. After a while it came to her that she had no internal life. Ortega says this is true of monkeys. But monkeys are known to dream. Evelyn says, “I never had a dream.”

She was once making love and the bed collapsed on her cat, who was asleep underneath, and broke its back. Since then, she says, sex hasn’t been the same for her. Then she dashes to the sink, grabs a knife, and looks back at me, her teeth shining, chilly as the steel, welcoming me to the wilderness.

Margaret tells me her lover is wonderful. “He makes me feel like a woman,” she says, “without degrading me.” I don’t know what she means, but can’t ask. What is it to feel like a woman? or to be made to feel that way?

I said to Margaret, “When we talk we make a small world of trust.” Quickly she says, “There are men so loose of soul they talk even in their sleep.” She laughs, surprised by her good memory and how wonderful Shakespeare is. She didn’t get it right, but the point is that it no longer mattered what I was going to say. I said, “You didn’t get it right.” She was talking, didn’t hear me.

I asked Deborah out to dinner. She said, “You looking for an exotic date or something?” Now she tells me that she went to an orgy in Berkeley. It was highly organized. On Wednesday, everyone met at the home of the couple, an engineer and his wife. People talked, got to know one another, then went home. They returned on Friday and took off their clothes. “But you didn’t have to undress or do anything,” said Deborah. “I only wanted to watch.” But so many of them begged her to undress that she finally consented, except for her underwear. Then she lay on the floor. The engineer, his wife, and their friends, all of them naked, kneeling on either side of her, mauled her. She was being polite.

“A Japanese angel.”

“I didn’t behave like them,” she said.

Sonny was my best friend. Then she says, “I met a man last night.” My heart grew heavy. I couldn’t count on her anymore for dinner, long talks on the telephone, serious attention to my problems, and she’d no longer tell me about herself, how well or ill she slept last night, and whether she dreamed, and what she did yesterday, and what people told her and she them. She said, “I don’t know why, but I feel guilty toward you.”

I said, “What’s he like?” She said he is some kind of a psychotherapist, divorced, lives in Mill Valley. His former wife is Korean, a fashion model. She made him install a plate-glass window in their living room so birds would fly into it and break their necks. She had them stuffed.

“Oh, I know the guy,” I said. “Women find him attractive.”

“How do men find him?”

I was conscious of the danger.

“He dresses well. He likes classical music and hiking. He goes sailing. He’s a good cook. Doesn’t smoke.”

“You think he’s a prick.”

Sonny was six years old when she went up on a roof with a boy. He pulled down his pants. She pulled down hers. They looked. Years later she still worried about what she’d done, thinking she could never be famous because the boy would tell everybody she’d pulled her pants down. She was a success in school and had innumerable boyfriends. None of that changed anything for her. At the age of six, in a thoughtless moment, she ruined her life.

Billy comes to my office, sits, looks me in the eye, and says, “Girls like to be spanked.”

Sonny will see the man, sleep with him, then linger in regret to the end. If I said, “I know for certain he has leprosy,” she would still see the man, etc. Nobody passes up romance.

Sonny says she dislikes being touched by doctors. I thought to remind her, but she said quickly, “He’s different.” With me — as if talking to herself — she needn’t bother about little connections.

There was a message for me at the motel. I hoped it was Sonny, but it’s from Evelyn.“Call immediately.” I call. The crazy pitch of her hello means she bought something or she met a famous person. I’m wrong. She says, “I went to a garage sale in the Oakland hills. Are you listening? There was a Swedish dresser with glass pulls. Inside one drawer I see a piece of paper, like folded in half. I opened it. It’s a sketch in red crayon. Old, but nice, not faded. I scrunched it quick into my purse. I also got a pewter dish and a pocket watch. I went home. No, first I met Sheila for coffee. I didn’t tell her what I got. She’s so jealous. Later I went home and took the sketch out of my purse. I smoothed it out. It’s the head of a woman, signed by Raphael. I almost died. So I phoned Sheila—”

“You stole a Raphael?”

“Listen, I almost died. Sheila has a friend in the art department at Berkeley. I called him and went to his office. He almost died. He said it looks authentic, but he couldn’t be positive. He told me to mail it to a man in England. The greatest living expert. So I mailed it to him.”

“Insured?”

“Regular mail. Listen. Listen, the expert just phoned me. He says he almost died. It’s authentic. But listen. Wait till you hear what else …”

Sonny tells me she will separate her emotional life from her sexual feelings. “In other words,” she said, “I’ll have an affair only if I can’t become entangled with the man.”

“In other words, you’re already doing it.”

“How embarrassing … I lied.”

Byron says, “And, after all, what is a lie? ’Tis but the truth in masquerade.”

Are some truths told only by lying?

You know why there is heaven and hell? It’s to make the past real. Otherwise there is no past. There is only the present.

Eddie met the woman years ago, in another state, prior to her divorce, long before she changed her hairstyle and became a different person. His own hair, though beginning to gray, was much the same. He figures she recognized him immediately, but since he didn’t recognize her, she didn’t tell him they’d met before. Both acted as if neither was part of the other’s past, even after they’d slept together again. Eddie imitated himself: “Oh, did you grow up in Michigan?” By then he knew she had. He remembered. Years earlier, he now remembered, the first time they made love, he’d asked, “How do you handle your feelings?” She had told him, in the tender darkness, that she loved her husband.

“Why are you doing this with me?”

“This is this,” she said, “and that is that.”

It would have been possible early on, with only a little embarrassment, to stop pretending.

“Don’t you remember me?”

“Should I? Wait, oh no. Oh no. This can’t be happening. You’re not Eddie Finger, are you?”

But Eddie didn’t, or couldn’t, stop pretending. Naturally, then, she couldn’t either. He told himself that she didn’t want to be recognized. Why else would she have changed her look? She actually did look different. Time passed. Then it was too late. It was impossible to stop pretending. Too much was invested in the lie, the black hole of their romance into which everything was sucked. He thinks she knew he knew she knew he knew. He couldn’t go on with it. There was too much not to say. He stopped seeing her. “She waits for me in hell,” he says. “We’ll discuss it then. But she’ll have changed her hair, you know what I mean?”