Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

He left the store and walked about the streets looking in other store windows. Every item that caught his attention was soon diminished by his memory of the swirl of gold and the impassioned red glob within.

Those earrings were too expensive. An infuriating price. It had been determined by a marketing demon, thought Beard, because the earrings now haunted him. He grew increasingly anxious as minutes passed and he continued walking the streets, pointlessly looking into shop windows, unable to forget the earrings.

He was determined not to return to the jewelry store, but then he let himself think: if he returned to the store only to look at the earrings — not to buy them — they would be gone. So it was too late to buy the earrings, he thought, as he hurried back to the store. To his relief, they were still there and more beautiful than he remembered.

The salesperson was a heavily made-up woman in her fifties who wore a black, finely pleated silk dress and gold-rimmed eyeglasses. She approached and stood opposite Beard at the glass counter. He looked down strictly at a necklace, not the earrings, though only a little while ago he’d asked her the price of the earrings. She wasn’t fooled. She knew what he wanted. Without being asked, she withdrew the earrings from their case and put them on the counter. Beard considered this highly impertinent, but he didn’t object. As if making a casual observation, she said,“I’ve never seen earrings like these before. I’m sure I’ll never see any like these again.”

“They’re much too expensive.”

“Do you think so?” She looked away toward the street, apparently uninterested in his opinion. It was late afternoon, nearly closing time. Her indifference to Beard’s remark annoyed him.

“Too expensive,” he said, as if he didn’t really want the earrings but was inviting her to haggle.

“Should I put them away?” she asked.

Beard didn’t answer.

“They are expensive, I suppose,” she said. “But prices fluctuate. If you like, I’ll keep your business card and phone you if the earrings aren’t sold in a few weeks.”

Beard heard contempt in her voice, as if she were saying the point of jewelry is to be expensive, even too expensive. He drew his wallet slowly from his jacket pocket, and then, with a thrill of suicidal exultation, he slapped his credit card, not his business card, on the glass beside the earrings. She plucked it up, stepped away, and ran the card through a machine. He signed the receipt quickly to disguise the tremor in his hand.

When he arrived at Inger’s apartment house, his heart was beating powerfully. He felt liberated, exceedingly happy, and slightly sick. He planned to take Inger to a fine restaurant. He’d done so before. She’d seemed not the least impressed, but tonight, after dinner, he would give her the earrings. The quality of the light in the restaurant, the delicious food, the wine, the subtle ministrations of the staff — such things matter. The earrings would intensify the occasion. She would be impressed, even if she didn’t think precisely like a whore. Besides, it would matter to Beard.

A woman in a short skirt opened the door. She was older than Inger and had cold violet eyes. Her black hair was cut level with her ears and across into severe, straight bangs, emphasizing her hard, thin-lipped expression. She looked somehow damaged and petrified by her beauty. Beard introduced himself. The woman said she was Greta Matti, Inger’s roommate, then said, “Inger is gone.”

“Impossible.”

“It is possible,” said Greta, her lips briefly, unpleasantly curled. Beard understood that Greta disliked being contradicted, but he didn’t believe her. The woman was malicious.

“She took her monkey,” she said. “Please go look for yourself. No clothes in her closet, no suitcase, no bicycle.”

Greta turned back into the apartment. Beard entered behind her and looked where she gestured toward a room, and then followed her into it. Closets and drawers were empty. There was nothing, no sign of human presence. Stunned by the emptiness, Beard felt he himself had been emptied.

“You never know a person,” said Greta. “She seemed so shy and studious, but she must have done something criminal. I was an idiot to let her move in, a girl with a monkey. Half the time it was I who fed the beast. The telephone never stopped ringing.”

Beard followed Greta to the kitchen. A teapot had been set on a small table with a cup and saucer.

“Where did she go?” he said. He didn’t expect a positive, useful answer. Who would disappear like that and leave an address? But what else could he say?

“You are not the first to ask. I don’t know where she comes from or where she went. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Greta sat at the table and turned slightly toward Beard. She crossed her legs. It was clear that she didn’t plan to stand up again to get another cup and saucer, and she seemed merely to assume Beard would stay. Her legs, he couldn’t not notice, were long, naked, and strikingly attractive in high heels. He glanced at the white flesh of her inner thigh and felt humbled and uncomfortable.

Greta poured tea for herself without waiting for his answer, and took a sip. Did she think her legs gave him enough? He wanted to ask questions, perhaps learn something about Inger. He knew hardly anything about her.

“I’m sorry,” said Greta, softening a little. “Her disappearance is very inconvenient for me. Perhaps it is worse for you.”

Beard nodded. “Does Inger owe you money?”

“Technically, I owe her money. She paid a month in advance. I can make another cup of tea.”

Beard was inclined to say yes. He needed company, but the whiteness of Greta’s legs had become unbearable; repulsively carnal. He couldn’t not look at them.

“Thank you,” he said. “I must go.”

Beard found a phone directory in a bar, looked up the address of the museum, and then hailed a taxi. He’d remembered that Inger took classes in paper restoration. They were given in the evening. At the museum, an administrator told him that Inger had quit the program. Beard next went to the restaurants where they had gone together. He didn’t expect to find her in any of them. To his painful disappointment, it was just as he expected. He returned to the hotel. Inger’s bicycle was no longer in the lobby, where it had been propped against a wall for two days. Its absence made him feel the bleakness of the marble floor, the sterility of the potted plants beside the desk, the loneliness of hotel lobbies.

In his room, Beard unwrapped the earrings and set them under the lamp on the night table. He studied the earrings with grim fascination, as if to penetrate their allure, the mystery of value. It came to him that, after creating the universe, God saw it was good. “So what is good about it?” Beard asked himself. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and felt tired and miserable, a condition long associated with thought.

The earrings, shining on the night table, told him nothing. They looked worthless. But it was value — the value of anything aside from life itself — that Beard thought about. As for life itself, he assumed its value was unquestionable because he hadn’t ever wanted to kill himself. Not even this minute when he felt so bad. Before he went to sleep, Beard read a train schedule and set the alarm on his travel clock.

At noon he checked out of his hotel, wearing his new jacket, and went to a restaurant where he ordered a grand lunch. He refused to suffer. He ate the lunch assiduously, though without pleasure, and then he took a taxi to the train station. The ticket he bought was first class, another luxurious expense, but he wanted — angrily — to pamper himself, or, as Inger would say, to be “self-indulgent.”