Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“Must you say that?”

“Sad, isn’t it? I used to get excited looking at you. But all you ever wanted was to fuck me. Admit it. Come on, be honest.” She leaned toward the mirror again, speaking to herself. “It’s hard work being beautiful. See this line?”

“What line?”

“This line. It wasn’t there last week.”

In a minute, she’d be out the door, gone. I imagined the empty motel room. I stood, pressed against her back, my cheek against hers in the mirror. I held her breasts. Her mirrored eyes remained blind to me. She said, “I knew you’d do that.”

“I’ll stay another day.”

Her blind eyes widened, as if to see what I meant.

“I don’t want to make you stay. You have your job, your family.” Her tone was principled. She tugged up the top of her dress, buttoned it.

“It’s what I want.”

“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“We’ll sleep late, then go someplace.”

“Have a cigarette. We’ll talk. You never really talked to me. Then I’ll get out of here.”

I held her hand, leading her from the mirror. She sat on the edge of the bed, her legs crossed, and watched me with no expression as I kneeled. I took offher shoes. She let me take off her dress—“No, don’t …”—slowly. Her voice was slithery, labile silk sliding away as she lay back, eyes shut, hands resting on the pillow.

Ocean made its word.

Far far away, John Wayne endured the blaze of traffic.

“Talk,” she whispered.

“About what?”

“Why did you phone me?”

“Why did you meet me?”

“What if I didn’t love you anymore?”

“I’d die.”

“I’ve been with another man. Are you dying?”

“Tell me.”

“He was so handsome he scared me. Do you want to hear?”

“Yes.”

“Does it turn you on?”

“I love your pleasure.”

“Hold me,” she whispered, then slept, her body fused along my side, breathing as I breathed.

Ocean fell along the beach.

I heard the god of night heaving a great sheet and hauling it back, and then heaving it again, trying to make his bed.

ONE SUMMER,at a honeymoon resort in the Catskill mountains, I saw a young woman named Sheila Kahn fall in love with her waiter. She had been married a few hours earlier in the city. This was her first night at dinner. The waiter bent beside her and asked if she wanted the steak or the chicken. She stared at him with big sick eyes. Her husband said, “Sheila?” Three other couples at the table, all just married, looked at Sheila as if waiting for the punch line of a joke. She sat like a dummy.

The waiter, Larry Starker, a tall fellow with Nordic cheekbones and an icy gray stare, was considered dangerously handsome. In fact, he’d modeled for the covers of cheap paperbacks, appearing as a Teutonic barbarian about to molest a semi-naked female who lay at his feet, manacled, writhing in terror-pleasure. He’d also appeared chained to a post, watching the approach of a whip-queen in leather regalia. But the real Larry Starker, twenty-two years old, didn’t have a clue about exotic sex. He’d completed a year of dental school and hoped to have an office someday in Brighton Beach, where he’d grown up playing handball with the neighborhood guys. Like everyone else on the dining-room staff, he was working to make money for books and tuition.

I was eighteen years old, Larry’s busboy. This was my first job in a good resort. The previous three summers, I’d worked in a schlock-house where, aside from heavy meals and a lake with a rowboat, there were few amenities, and the dining-room staff slept two to a bed. Husbands arrived on weekends, set a card table on the lawn, and played pinochle, ignoring the women and children they’d come to visit. My own family used to go to a place like that every summer, and my father was one of the men playing pinochle. He never once took me fishing or hunting, like an American dad, but then he never went fishing or hunting. The only place he ever took me was to the stonecutter’s, one Sunday afternoon, when he ordered his gravestone.

As Larry’s busboy, I cleared away dishes, poured coffee, served desserts, then set the tables for the next meal. Between breakfast and lunch, we had an hour break and we all lay about dozing in the bunkhouse or sat on our narrow beds writing letters home. Between lunch and dinner, there was a two-and-a-half-hour break. Some of us slept through the afternoon heat, others spent the time reading, and others played cards, or handball, or basketball, or went swimming. After we worked dinner, nobody wanted to sleep. It was then about 9:00 p.m. We’d taken orders from strangers in the dining room, and chefs had screamed at us from behind a steam table. We should have been exhausted, but the nighttime air smelled good, the starry mountain skies were exhilarating, and we were young.

As we showered and dressed, the fine strain of a flute came through the darkness. It meant the Latin dance band was playing. In clean shirts and sport jackets, we left the bunkhouse, hurrying toward the lights of the casino, where we danced the mambo. Our partners were the young brides. When that became depressing, we took off for another resort and danced with free women, governesses, chambermaids, or guests who were unmarried or whose husbands were in the city.

There may have been waitresses in the Catskill resorts, but I never met one. Since women guests far outnumbered the men, waiters and busboys were universally hired to make up the shortage. At the honeymoon resort there was no shortage, but the dining-room staff was all men, anyway. I don’t know why. Maybe the atmosphere of newly married bliss forbade hanky-panky among the help.

Latin music was the rage in the early fifties. You would hear the dining-room staff singing in Spanish: rumbas, mambos, cha-cha-chas. We understood the feeling in the words, not the words. We called Latin music “Jewish.” The wailing melodies were reminiscent of Hebraic and Arabic chanting, but we only meant the music was exciting to us. A fusion music, conflating Europe and Africa. In mambo, Spanish passion throbs to Nigerian syncopation. In Yiddish, the German, Hebrew, Spanish, Polish, and English words are assimilated to a culture and a system of sound. The fox-trot and lindy hop we called “American.” They had a touch of Nigeria, too, but compared to mambo or Yiddish, they felt like “Jingle Bells.”

Handsome Larry Starker, with his straight dark-blond hair and long bones, danced the mambo as well as anyone at the Palladium in Manhattan, great hall of the conga drum, Machito, and Tito Puente. Other dancers made a space when Larry stepped onto the floor. The music welcomed him, horns became more brilliant, congas and timbales talked to his belly. He did no fancy steps, but in the least of his motions he was wonderful, displaying the woman who danced in his arms, turning her around and around for the world to see.

Larry gave me 40 percent of his tips, the customary waiter-busboy split. On Sundays after lunch, guests checked out and tipped the waiter six dollars, and the busboy four. Sometimes they put money directly in my hand, but more often they gave it to Larry. We shoved the money into the pockets of our black sweaty trousers. Later, in the bunkhouse, each of us went off alone and pulled out sticky wads by the fistful, peeling away bills, counting as they fluttered to the bed. At the end of the summer, having worked ten-to-fourteen-hour days, sometimes seven days a week, I expected to make between eight and twelve hundred dollars.