Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

As the train pulled out of the station, Beard slid the compartment door shut and settled beside the window with a collection of colorful, expensive magazines that he’d bought in the station. The magazines were full of advertisements for expensive things. Almost every page flared with brilliant color, and they crackled sensuously. They smelled good, too. He stared at pictures of nearly naked models and tried to feel desire. Exactly for what he couldn’t say. It wasn’t their bodies. Maybe it was for the future, more experience, more life. Then he reached into his jacket pocket to get his cigarettes and the earrings, intending to look at them again and resume his engagement with deep thought. He felt his cigarettes, but the earrings weren’t in his pocket. Nor were they in any other pocket.

Beard knew instantly that he needn’t bother to search his pockets, which he did repeatedly, because he remembered putting the earrings on the night table and he had no memory of picking them up. Because he hadn’t picked them up. He knew. He knew.

As the train left the city and gained speed, he quit searching his pockets. Oh God, why had he bought the earrings? How could he have been so stupid? In an instant of emotional lunacy, he’d slapped his credit card down in the jewelry store and undone himself. The earrings were a curse, in some way even responsible for Inger’s disappearance. He had to get hold of himself, think realistically, practically. He had to figure out what to do about retrieving them.

It was urgent that he communicate with the hotel. Perhaps he could send a telegram from the train, or from the next station. He would find a conductor. But really, as he thought further about it, he decided it wasn’t urgent to communicate with the hotel. It was a good hotel. This was Germany, not America. Nobody would steal his earrings. They would soon follow him to his destination, another good hotel. They were not gone forever. He had nothing to worry about. This effort to reassure himself brought him almost to tears. He wanted desperately to retrieve the earrings. He stood up and went to the door. About to slide it open and look for a conductor, he heard a knock. He slid the door open with a delirious expectation. The conductor would be there, grinning, the earrings held forth in his open hand. Beard stared into the face of Inger.

“Hello,” he said, in a gentle, reproachful voice.

She said, looking at his eyes, her expression bewildered and yet on the verge of recognition, “I’m so sorry. I must have the wrong—” and then she let go of her suitcase and said, “Gott behüte!” The suitcase hit the floor with a thud and bumped the side of her leg.

Beard said, “Inger,” and he didn’t think so much as feel, with an odd little sense of gratification, that she wasn’t very pretty. There was a timeless, silent moment in which they stared at each other and his feelings collected. The moment gave Beard a chance to see Inger exactly as she was: a slender, pale girl with pensive gray eyes whose posture was exceptionally straight. She made an impression of neatness, correctness, and youth. In this access of plain reality, he felt no anger and no concern for the earrings. As he could now see, they would look absurd on the colorless Inger. He felt only that his heart was breaking, and there was nothing he could do about it.

With a slow, uncertain smile, Inger said, “How are you?”

Beard picked up her suitcase. “You always travel first class?”

“Not always.”

“It depends on the gentleman who answers the door.”

“I’m very pretty,” she said, her tone sweet and tentative and faintly self-mocking.

“Also lucky.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m sure of it.”

He put her suitcase onto the seat strewn with magazines. Then he took her hand, drew her toward him, and slid the door shut behind her. She said, “Please. Do give me a moment,” but she didn’t resist when he pressed her to the floor, his knee between her thighs. Her gray eyes were noncommittal and vast as the world. Beard raised up on his knees to undo his trousers and then he removed Inger’s sandals. He kissed her feet and proceeded to lick her legs and slide her skirt to her hips. Then he hooked the crotch of her underpants with an index finger and drew them to the side and he licked her until she seized his hair with her fists and pulled him up, needing him inside as much as he needed her. He whispered, “I love you,” his mouth against her neck, and he shut his eyes in a trance of pleasure and thrust into her, in her clothes, as the train pressed steadily into a mute and darkening countryside.

CLAUDE RUEhad a wide face with yellowish green eyes and a long aristocratic nose. The mouth was a line, pointed in the center, lifted slightly at the ends, curving in a faint smile, almost cruelly sensual. He dragged his right foot like a stone, and used a cane, digging it into the floor as he walked. His dark blue suit, cut in the French style, armholes up near the neck, made him look small in the shoulder, and made his head look too big. I liked nothing about the man that I could see.

“What a face,” I whispered to Margaret. “Who would take anything he says seriously?”

She said, “Who wouldn’t? Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. And the way he dresses. Such style.”

After that, I didn’t say much. I hadn’t really wanted to go to the lecture in the first place.

Every seat in the auditorium was taken long before Rue appeared onstage. People must have come in from San Francisco, Oakland, Marin, and beyond. There were even sad creatures from the Berkeley streets, some loonies among them, in filthy clothes, open sores on their faces like badges. I supposed few in the audience knew that Claude Rue was a professor of Chinese history who taught at the Sorbonne, but everyone knew he’d written The Mists of Shanghai, a thousand-page, best-selling novel.

Onstage, Rue looked lonely and baffled. Did all these people actually care to hear his lecture on the loss of classical Chinese? He glanced about, as if there had been a mistake and he was searching for his replacement, the star of the show, the real Claude Rue. I approved of his modesty, and I might have enjoyed listening to him. But then, as if seized by an irrational impulse, Rue lifted the pages of his lecture for all to witness, and ripped them in half. “I will speak from my heart,” he said.

The crowd gasped. I groaned. Margaret leaned toward him, straining, as if to pick up his odor. She squeezed my hand and checked my eyes to see whether I understood her feelings. She needed a reference point, a consciousness aside from her own to slow the rush of her being toward Rue.

“You’re terrible,” I said.

“Don’t spoil my fantasy. Be quiet, O.K.?”

She then flattened her thigh against mine, holding me there while she joined him in her feelings, onstage, fifty feet away. Rue began his speech without pages or notes. The crowd grew still. Many who couldn’t find seats stood in the aisles, some with bowed heads, staring at the floor as if they’d been beaten on the shoulders into penitential silence. For me it was also penitential. I work nights. I didn’t like wasting a free evening in a crowded lecture hall when I could have been alone with Margaret.

I showed up at her loft an hour before the lecture. She said to her face in the bathroom mirror, “I can hardly wait to see the man. How do I look?”

“Chinese.” I put the lid down on the toilet seat, sat on it.

“Answer me. Do I look all right, Herman?”

“You know what the ancient Greeks said about perfume?”

“I’m about to find out.”

“To smell sweet is to stink.”