Leonard Michaels: The Collected Stories

IT WAS A BLIND DATE. SHE MET ME AT THE DOORand smiled nicely. I could tell she was disappointed. Fortunately, I had brought a bottle of bourbon. An expensive brand, though not a penny too much for a positive Weltanschauung. I felt disappointed, too. We finished the bourbon and were sitting on the couch. She stuttered the tale of her life and named her favorite authors. I’d never met a girl who stuttered. Our hands became interlocked and hot, our knees touched. Both of us were crying. I cried for her. She, moved by my tears, cried for me. Beyond the room, our sobs, and her breaking, retrogressive voice, I heard church bells. I squeezed her hands, shook my head, and staggered from the couch to a window. Glass broke, I fainted, and minutes later awoke on a porch just below the window. She was kneeling beside my head, smoking a cigarette. I heard her voice repeating consonants, going on with the story of her life — a bad man, accident, disease. Broken glass lay about me like stars. Church bells rang the hour, then the half hour. I lay still, thinking nothing, full of mood. Cloth moved smoothly across her thighs as she breathed and rocked to the measures of her story. Despicable as it may seem, that made me sexual. I lifted on an elbow. The sight of my face with the moon shining in it surprised her. She stopped telling her story and said, “No, I d-don’t want t-to …” Our eyelids were thick with water. We shook like unhealthy, feverish things.

There was a reason for not having called her again. Shame, disgust, what have you? When I saw her in the street I would run. I saw her there often, and I ran hundreds of miles. My legs became strong, my chest and lungs immense. Soon I could run like a nimble dog. I could wheel abruptly, scramble left or right, and go for half the day. I could leap fences and automobiles, run from roof to roof, spring deadly air shafts, and snap in middle flight to gain the yard that saved my life. Once, I caught a sparrow smack in my teeth and bit off his head. Spitting feathers and blood, I felt like an eagle. But I was not, and good things, however vigorous, come to an end. At least for me. I was neither Nietzsche, Don Juan, nor Chateaubriand. My name was Phillip. As I resolved to stand and started practicing postures, a friend who knew the girl came and said she wasn’t reproachful. I ought to call her on the phone. It didn’t sound true, but he insisted. She wanted to see me again, at least as an acquaintance. She would be spared the implications of my flight. I could rest in body and mind. Next time I saw her in the street I ran faster than before, my hair flying, my eyes big. I ran half the day and all that night.

My friend came again. Running alongside, he shouted that he had had her, too. We stopped.

“Do you mind?” he asked. It had bothered him so much he couldn’t sleep.

“Mind?” I kissed him on the cheek and slapped his back. Was I happy? The answer is yes. I laughed till my sight was bleary. My ribs, spreading with pleasure, made a noise like wheezy old wood. My friend began laughing, too, and it was a conflation of waters, lapping and overlapping.

A crooked nose and small blue eyes — Henry. A nose, eyes, a curious mouth, a face, my own felt face behind my eyes, an aspect of my mind, a habit of my thought — my friend Henry. The sight of him was mysterious news, like myself surprised in a mirror, at once strange and familiar. He was tall and went loose and swinging in his stride. Degas dreamed the motion of that dance, a whirl of long bones through streets and rooms. I was shorter, narrower, and conservative in motion. A sharp complement striding at his side. As Henry was open, I was closed, slipping into my parts for endless consultation, like a poker player checking possibilities at the belt. He and I. Me and him. Such opposite adaptations contradict the logic of life, abolish Darwin, testify to miracle and God. I never voiced this idea, but I would think: Henry, you ought to be dead and utterly vanished, decomposed but for the splinter of tibula or jawbone locked in bog, or part of a boulder, baked, buried, and one with rock. I meant nothing malicious;just the wonder of it.

Now, in company, Henry would grin, expose his dearly familiar chipped front tooth, and whisper, “Tell them how you fell out the window.”

“Out the window,” people would shout. “You fell out the window? What window?”

I told the story, but declined the honor of being hero. “No, no, not I — this fellow I know — happened to him. Young man out of a job, about my age, depressed about life and himself. You must know the type — can’t find meaningful work, spends a lot of time in the movies, wasting …

“It was suggested he call a certain girl named Marjorie, herself out of work, not seeing anyone in particular. He asked why out of work. They told him she had had an accident and lived on the insurance payments. Pretty girl? ‘Not what you would call pretty. Interesting-looking, bright.’ So he called and she said glad to see him, come by, bring something to drink. She had a stutter. It annoyed him, but not so much as her enthusiasm. Anyhow, he was committed. He went with a bottle, and though she was interesting-looking, he was disappointed and began straight in to drink and drink. Perhaps disappointed, too, she drank as fast and as much. The liquor qualified their sense of one another and themselves. Soon they sat on the couch and were full of expectations, drinking, drinking, chatting. He told her about his life, the jobs he had lost, how discontented he felt, and about his one good friend. She followed in a gentle, pleasing way, ooing and clucking. He said there were no frontiers left, nothing for a man to do but explore his own mind and go to the movies. She agreed and said she spent a lot of time just looking in a mirror. Then she came closer and told him about her life. He came closer, too, and fondled her fingertips. She had been raised in an orphanage. He pressed her palms. She had gone to work in a factory. He held her wrists. In an accident at the factory, her leg was bashed and permanently damaged. His hands slid up and down her arms. She limped slightly but the company paid. She didn’t mind the limp. He shook his head no. The scars on her face made her look a bit tough; that bothered her. He moaned. She pulled up her dress, showed him the damage, and he began to cry as he snapped it down again. She cried, too, and pulled it back up. He stumbled from the couch, crying, punching his fists together as he went to the window. Trying to open it he fell through and was nearly killed.”

People loved the story and Henry cackled for more.

“You’re such a jerk,” he said. My heart lunged fiercely with pleasure.

How I carried on. Henry urged me. I carried on and on. Everyone laughed when I fell out the window. No one asked what happened next. Anyhow, the tale of abused and abandoned femininity is pathetic and tediously familiar. Only low, contemptible men who take more pleasure in telling it than doing it would tell it. I stopped for a while after I had a dream in which Henry wanted to kill me.

“Me?” I asked.

“That’s right, scum. You!”

Only a dream, but so is life. I took it seriously. Did it warn me of a disaster on the way? Did it indicate a fearful present fact? I studied Henry. Indeed, his face had changed. Never a handsome face, but now, like his face in the dream, it was strangely uncertain, darker, nasty about the edges of the eyes and mouth. Dirty little pimples dotted his neck, and the front chipped tooth gave a new quality to his smile, something asymmetrical, imbecilic, and obscene. He looked dissolute and suicidal.

He rarely came to visit me anymore, but we met in the street. Our talk would be more an exchange of looks than words. He looked at me as if I were bleeding. I looked at him quizzically. I looked at him with irony; he returned it with innocence. He burst out laughing. I smiled and looked ready to share the joke. He looked blank, as if I were about to tell him what it was. I grinned, he sneered, he smiled, I frowned, I frowned, he was pained. He looked pained, I looked at my shoes. He looked at my shoes, I looked at his. We looked at one another and he mentioned a mutual friend.