Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“I use very little perfume. There’s a reception afterward, a party. It’s in honor of the novel. A thousand pages and I could have kept reading it for another week. I didn’t want it to end. I’ll tell you the story later.”

“Maybe I’ll read it, too,” I said, trying not to sound the way I felt. “But why must you see what the man looks like? I couldn’t care less.”

“You won’t go with me?” She turned from the mirror, as if, at last, I’d provoked her into full attention.

“I’m not saying I won’t.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. I asked a question, that’s all. It isn’t important. Forget it.”

“Don’t slither. You have another plan for the evening? You’d rather go somewhere else?”

“I have no other plan. I’m asking why should anyone care what an author looks like.”

“I’m interested. I have been for months.”

“Why?”

“Why not? He made me feel something. His book was an experience. Everybody wants to see him. Besides, my sister met him in Beijing. She knows him. Didn’t I read you her letter?”

“I still don’t see why …”

“Herman, what do you want me to say? I’m interested, I’m curious. I’m going to his lecture. If you don’t want to go, don’t go.”

That is, leave the bathroom. Shut the door. Get out of sight.

Margaret can be too abrupt, too decisive. It’s her business style carried into personal life. She buys buildings, has them fixed up, then rents or sells, and buys again. She has supported herself this way since her divorce from Sloan Pierson, professor of linguistics. He told her about Claude Rue’s lecture, invited her to the reception, and put my name on the guest list. Their divorce, compared to some, wasn’t bad. No lingering bitterness. They have remained connected — not quite friends — through small courtesies, like the invitation; also, of course, through their daughter, Gracie, ten years old. She lives with Sloan except when Margaret wants her, which is often. Margaret’s business doesn’t allow a strict schedule. She appears at Sloan’s door without notice. “I need her,” she says. Gracie scampers to her room, collects schoolbooks for the next day, and packs a duffel bag with clothes and woolly animals.

Sloan sighs, shakes his head. “Really, Margaret. Gracie has needs, too. She needs a predictable daily life.” Margaret says, “I’ll phone you later. We’ll discuss our needs.”

She comes out of the house with Gracie. Sloan shouts, “Wait. Gracie’s pills.”

There’s always one more word, one more thing to collect. “Goodbye. Wait.” I wait. We all wait. Margaret and Gracie go back into the house, and I stand outside. I’m uncomfortable inside the house, around Sloan. He’s friendly, but I know too much about him. I can’t help thinking things, making judgments, and then I feel guilty. He’s a fussy type, does everything right. If he’d only fight Margaret, not be so good, so correct. Sloan could make trouble about Margaret’s unscheduled appearances, even go to court, but he thinks if Margaret doesn’t have her way, Gracie will have no mother. Above all things, Sloan fears chaos. Gracie senses her daddy’s fear, shares it. Margaret would die for Gracie, but it’s a difficult love, measured by intensities. Would Margaret remember, in such love, about the pills?

Sloan finds the pills, brings them to the foyer, hands them to Margaret. There. He did another correct thing. She and Gracie leave the house. We start down the path to the sidewalk. Gracie hands me her books and duffel bag, gives me a kiss, and says, “Hi, Herman German. I have an ear infection. I have to take pills four times a day.” She’s instructing Margaret, indirectly.

Margaret glares at me to show that she’s angry. Her ten-year-old giving her instructions. I pretend not to notice. Gracie is a little version of Margaret, not much like Sloan. Chinese chemistry is dominant. Sloan thinks Gracie is lucky. “That’s what I call a face,” he says. He thinks he looks like his name — much too white.

I say, “Hi, Gracie Spacey.” We get into my Volvo. I drive us away.

Gracie sits back. Margaret, sitting beside me, stares straight ahead, silent, still pissed, but after a while she turns, looks at Gracie. Gracie reads her mind, gives her a hug. Margaret feels better, everyone feels better.

While Margaret’s houses are being fixed up, she lives in one, part of which becomes her studio, where she does her painting. Years ago, at the university, studying with the wonderful painters Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff, Margaret never discovered a serious commitment in herself. Later, when she married and had Gracie, and her time was limited, seriousness arrived. Then came the divorce, the real estate business, and she had even less time. She paints whenever she can, and she reads fifty or sixty novels a year; also what she calls “philosophy,” which is religious literature. Her imagery in paintings comes from mythic, visionary works. From the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian cosmological chant, she took visions of land and sea, where creatures of the different realms are mysteriously related. Margaret doesn’t own a television set or go to movies. She denies herself common entertainment for the same reason that Rilke refused to be analyzed by Freud. “I don’t want my soul diluted,” she says.

Sometimes, I sit with her in her loft in Emeryville — in a four-story brick building, her latest purchase — while she paints. “Are you bored?” she asks.

I’m never bored, I like being with her. I like the painting odors, the drag and scratch of brush against canvas. She applies color, I feel it in my eyes. Tingling starts along my forearms, hairs lift and stiffen. We don’t talk. Sometimes not a word for hours, yet the time lacks nothing.

I say, “Let’s get married.”

She says, “We are married.”

Another hour goes by.

She asks, “Is that a painting?”

I make a sound to suggest that it is.

“Is it good?”

She knows.

When one of her paintings, hanging in a corner of a New York gallery owned by a friend, sold — without a formal show, and without reviews — I became upset. She’ll soon be famous, I thought.

“I’ll lose you,” I said.

She gave me nine paintings, all she had in the loft. “Take this one, this one, this one …”

“Why?”

“Take them, take them.”

She wanted to prove, maybe, that our friendship was inviolable; she had no ambition to succeed, only to be good. I took the paintings grudgingly, as if I were doing her a favor. In fact, that’s how I felt. I was doing her a favor. But I wanted the paintings. They were compensation for her future disappearance from my life. We’re best friends, very close. I have no vocation. She owed me the paintings.

I quit graduate school twenty years ago, and began waiting tables at Gemma’s, a San Francisco restaurant. From year to year, I expected to find other work or to write professionally. My one book, Local Greens , which is about salads, was published by a small press in San Francisco. Not a bestseller, but it made money. Margaret told me to invest in a condominium and she found one for me, the top floor of a brown-shingle house, architect unknown, in the Berkeley hills. I’d been living in Oakland, in a one-room apartment on Harrison Street, near the freeway. I have a sedentary nature. I’d never have moved out. Never really have known, if not for Margaret, that I could have a nicer place, be happier. “I’m happy,” I said. “This place is fine.” She said my room was squalid. She said the street was noisy and dangerous. She insisted that I talk to a realtor or check the newspapers for another place, exert myself, do something. Suddenly, it seemed, I had two bedrooms, living room, new kitchen, hardwood floors, a deck, a bay view, monthly payments — property.