Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“Do you drive a car?”

She said, “Yes,” holding her hand out to the side, toward me, blindly. I slipped the keys to my Volvo into her palm. Tomorrow, I’d ride to her place on my bike and retrieve the car. Margaret wouldn’t remember that she’d taken it. She and Rue walked away, but I felt it was I who grew smaller in the gathering distance. Margaret glanced back at me to say goodbye. Rue, staring at Margaret, lost peripheral vision, thus annihilating me. I might have felt insulted, but he’d been seized by hormonal ferocity, and was focused on a woman. I’d have treated him similarly.

Months earlier, I’d heard about Rue from Margaret. She’d heard about him from her sister May, who had a Ph.D. in library science from Berkeley and worked at the university library in Beijing. In a letter to Margaret, May said she’d met Professor Claude Rue, the linguistic historian. He was known in academic circles, but not yet an international celebrity. Rue was in Beijing completing his research for The Mists of Shanghai . May said, in her letter, that Rue was a “womanizer.” He had bastard children in France and Tahiti. She didn’t find him attractive, but other women might. “If you said Claude Rue is charming or has pretty green eyes, I wouldn’t disagree, but as I write to you, I have trouble remembering what he looks like.”

Margaret said the word “womanizer” tells more about May than Rue. “She’s jealous. She thinks Rue is fucking every woman except her.”

“She says she doesn’t find him attractive, doesn’t even know what he looks like.”

“She finds him very attractive, and she knows what he looks like, what he sounds like, smells like, feels like. May has no respect for personal space. She touches people when she talks to them. She’s a shark, with taste sensors in her skin. When May takes your hand, or brushes up against you, she’s tasting you. Nobody but sharks and cannibals can do that. She shakes somebody’s hand, then tells me, ‘Needs salt and a little curry.”’

“All right. Maybe ‘womanizer’ says something about May, but the word has a meaning. Regardless of May, ‘womanizer’ means something.”

“What?”

“You kidding?”

“Tell me. What does it mean?”

“What do you think? It means a man who sits on the side of the bed at two in the morning, putting on his shoes.”

“What do you call women who do that? Don’t patronize me, Herman. Don’t you tell me what ‘womanizer’ means.”

“Why did you ask?”

“To see if you’d tell me. So patronizing. I know exactly what the word means. ‘Womanizer’ means my sister May wants Claude Rue to fuck her.”

“Get a dictionary. I want to see where it mentions your sister and Claude Rue.”

“The dictionary is a cemetery of dead words. All words are dead until somebody uses them. ‘Womanizer’ is dead. If you use it, it lives, uses you.”

“Nonsense.”

“People once talked about nymphomaniacs, right? Remember that word? Would you ever use it without feeling it said something embarrassing about you? Get real, Herman. Everyone is constantly on the make — even May. Even you.”

“Not me.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re old-fashioned, which is to say narrow-minded. Self-righteous. Incapable of seeing yourself. You disappoint me, Herman. You really do. What about famous men who had bastards? Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, the Earl of Gloucester, Edward VII.”

“I don’t care who had bastards. That isn’t pertinent. You’re trying to make a case for bad behavior.”

“Rodin, Hegel, Marx, Castro — they all had bastards. If they are all bad, that’s pertinent. My uncle Chan wasn’t famous, but he had two families. God knows what else he had. Neither family knew of the other until he died. Then it became pertinent, everyone squabbling over property.”

“What’s your point, if you have one, which I seriously doubt?”

“And what about Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Parker, J.FK., M.L.K.? What about Chinese emperors and warlords, Arab sheiks, movie actors, thousands of Mormons? Everybody collects women. That’s why there are prostitutes, whores, courtesans, consorts, concubines, bimbos, mistresses, wives, flirts, hussies, sluts, etc., etc. How many words are there for man? Not one equivalent for ‘cunt,’ which can mean a woman. ‘Prick’ means some kind of jerk. Look at magazine covers, month after month. They’re selling clothes and cosmetics? They sell women, stupid. You know you’re stupid. Stupid Herman, that’s you.”

“They’re selling happiness, not women.”

“It’s the same thing. Lions, monkeys, horses, goats, people … many, many, many animals collect women animals. When they stop, they become unhappy and they die. Married men live longer than single men. This has long been true. The truth is the truth. What am I talking about? Hug me, please.”

“The truth is, you’re madly in love with Claude Rue.”

“I’ve never met the man. Don’t depress me.”

“Your sister mentions him in a letter, you imagine she wants him. She wants him, you want him. You’re in love, you’re jealous.”

“You’re more jealous.”

“You admit it? You’ve never before conceded anything in an argument. I feel like running in the streets, shrieking the news.”

“I admit nothing. After reading my sister May’s gossipy, puritanical letter, I find that I dislike Claude Rue intensely.”

“You never met the man.”

“How can that have any bearing on the matter?”

As for the people in the large reception room at the Faculty Club — deans, department heads, assistant professors, students, wives, husbands — gathered to honor Claude Rue — he’d flicked us off like a light. I admired Rue for that, and I wished his plane back to Paris would crash. Behind me, a woman whispered in the exact tone Margaret had used, “I dislike him intensely.”

A second woman said, “You know him?”

“Of course not. I’ve heard things, and his novel is very sexist.”

“You read the novel. Good for you.”

“I haven’t read it. I saw a review in a magazine at my hairdresser’s. I have the magazine. I’ll look for it tonight when I get home.”

“Sexist?” said the first woman. “Odd. I heard he’s gay.”

“Gay?” said a man. “How interesting. I suppose one can be gay and sexist, but I’d never have guessed he was gay. He looks straight to me. Who told you he’s gay? Someone who knows him?”

“Well, not with a capital K, if that’s what you mean by ‘knows,’ but he was told by a friend of Rue’s that he agreed to fly here and give this lecture only because of the San Fran bath houses. That’s what he was told. Gossip in this town spreads quick as genital warts.”

“Ho, ho, ho. People are so dreadfully bored. Can you blame them? They have no lives, just careers and Volvos.”

“That’s good. I intend to use it. Do look for conversational citations in the near future. But who is the Chinese thing? I’ll die if I don’t find out. She’s somebody, isn’t she? Ask him.”

“Who?”

“Him, him. That man. He was standing with her.” Someone plucked my jacket sleeve. I turned. A face desiccated by propriety leaned close, old eyes, shimmering liquid gray, bulging, rims hanging open like thin crimson labia. It spoke:

“Pardon me, sir. Could you please tell us the name of the Chinese woman who, it now seems, is leaving the reception with Professor Rue?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Margaret said the success of his lecture left Rue giddily deranged, expecting something more palpable from the night. He said, she said, that he couldn’t have returned to his hotel room, watched TV, and gone to sleep. “‘Why is it like this for me, do you think?’”he said, she said. ‘It would have no style. You were loved,”’ she said, she said, sensing his need to be reminded of the blatant sycophancy of his herdlike audience. “‘Then you appeared,’” he said, she said. “‘You were magnificently cold.’”