Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

Voilà! Margaret. She is cold. She is attentive. She is determined to fuck him. He likes her quickness, and her legs. He says that to her. He also likes the way she drives, and her hair — the familiar black Asian kind, but which, because of its dim coppery strain, is rather unusual. He likes her eyes, too. I said, “Margaret, let me: ‘Your gray-tinted glasses give a sensuous glow to your sharply tipped Chinese eyes, which are like precious black glittering pebbles washed by the Yangtze. Also the Yalu.’”

Margaret said, “Please shut up, dog-eyed white devil. I’m in no mood for jokes.”

Her eyes want never to leave Rue’s face, she said, but she must concentrate on the road as she drives. The thing is under way for them. I could feel it as she talked, how she was thrilled by the momentum, the invincible rush, the necessity. Resentment built in my sad heart. I thought, Margaret is over thirty years old. She has been around the block. But it’s never enough. Once more around the block, up the stairs, into the room, and there lies happiness.

“‘Why shouldn’t I have abandoned the party for you?”’ he said, she said, imitating his tone, plaintive and arrogant. “‘I wrote a novel.”’ He laughs at himself. Margaret laughs, imitating him, an ironic self-deprecatory laugh. The moment seemed to her phony and real at once, said Margaret. He was nervous, as he’d been onstage, unsure of his stardom, unconvinced even by the flood of abject adoration. “‘Would a man write a novel except for love?’” he said, she said, as if he didn’t really know. He was sincerely diffident, she said, an amazing quality considering that he’d slept with every woman in the world. But what the hell, he was human. With Margaret, sex will be more meaningful. “‘Except for love?’” she said, she said, gaily, wondering if he’d slept with her sister. “‘How about your check from the university?’”

“‘You think I’m inconsistent?’” He’d laughed. Spittle shot from his lips and rotten teeth. She saw everything except the trouble, what lay deep in the psychic plasma that rushed between them.

She drove him to her loft, in the warehouse and small factory district of Emeryville, near the bay, where she lived and worked, and bought and sold. Canvases, drawings, clothes — everything was flung about. She apologized.

He said, “‘A great disorder is an order.’”

“Did you make that up?”

He kissed her. She kissed him.

“‘Yes,’” he said. Margaret stared at me, begging for pity. He didn’t make that up. A bit of an ass, then, but really, who isn’t? She expected Rue to get right down to love. He wanted a drink first. He wanted to look at her paintings, wanted to use the bathroom and stayed inside a long time, wanted something to eat, then wanted to read poetry. It was close to midnight. He was reading poems aloud, ravished by beauties of phrasing, shaken by their music. He’d done graduate work at Oxford. Hours passed. Margaret sat on the couch, her legs folded under her. She thought it wasn’t going to happen, after all. Ten feet away, he watched her from a low-slung leather chair. The frame was a steel tube bent to form legs, arms, and backrest. A book of modern poetry lay open in his lap. He was about to read another poem when Margaret said, in the flat black voice, “‘Do you want me to drive you to your hotel?’”

He let the book slide to the floor. Stood up slowly, struggling with the leather-wheezing-ass-adhesive chair seat, then came toward her, pulling stone foot. Leaning down to where she sat on the couch, he kissed her. Her hand went up, lightly, slowly, between his legs.

“He wasn’t a very great lover,” she said.

She had to make him stop, give her time to regather powers of feeling and smoke a joint before trying again. Then, him inside, “working on me,” she said, she fingered her clitoris to make herself come. “There would have been no payoff otherwise,” she said. “He’d talked too much, maybe. Then he was a tourist looking for sensations in the landscape. He couldn’t give. It was like he had a camera. Collecting memories. Savoring the sex, you know what I mean? I could have been in another city.” Finally, Margaret said, she screamed,“‘What keeps you from loving me?’” He fell away, damaged.

“‘You didn’t enjoy it?’” he said, she said.

She turned on the lamp to roll another joint, and told him to lie still while she studied his cock, which was oddly discolored and twisted left. In the next three days, the sex got better, not great. She’d say, “‘You’re losing me.’” He’d moan.

When she left him at the airport, she felt relieved, but driving back to town, she began to miss him. She thought to phone her psychotherapist, but this wasn’t a medical problem. The pain surprised her and it wouldn’t quit. She couldn’t work, couldn’t think. Despite strong reservations — he hadn’t been very nice to her — she was in love, had been since she saw him onstage. Yes; definitely love. Now he was gone. She was alone. In the supermarket, she wandered the aisles, unable to remember what she needed. She was disoriented — her books, her plants, her clothes, her hands — nothing seemed really hers. At night, the loneliness was very bad. Sexual. Hurt terribly. She cried herself to sleep.

“Why didn’t you phone me?”

“I knew you weren’t too sympathetic. I couldn’t talk to you. I took Gracie out of school. She’s been here for the last couple of days.”

“She likes school.”

“That’s just what you’d say, isn’t it? You know, Herman, you are a kind of person who makes me feel like shit. If Gracie misses a couple of days it’s no big deal. She’s got a lot of high Qs. I found out she also has head lice. Her father doesn’t notice anything. Gracie would have to have convulsions before he’d notice. Too busy advancing himself, writing another ten books that nobody will read, except his pathetic graduate students.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“Yes, it is. It’s fair.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“You defending Sloan? Whose friend are you?”

“Talking to you is like cracking nuts with my teeth.”

She told me Rue had asked if she knew Chinese. She said she didn’t. He proposed to teach her, and said, “‘The emperor forbid foreigners to learn Chinese, except imperfectly, only for purposes of trade. Did you know that?’”

“‘No. Let’s begin.’”

Minutes into the lesson, he said, “‘You’re pretending not to know Chinese. I am a serious person. Deceive your American lovers. Not me.’”

She said, “Nobody ever talked to me like that. He was furious.”

“Didn’t you tell him to go to hell?”

“I felt sorry for him.”

She told him that she really didn’t know a word of Chinese. Her family had lived in America for more than a hundred years. She was raised in Sacramento. Her parents spoke only English. All her friends had been white. Her father was a partner in a construction firm. His associates were white. When the Asian population of the Bay Area greatly increased, she saw herself, for the first time, as distinctly Chinese. She thought of joining Chinese cultural organizations, but was too busy. She sent money.

“‘You don’t know who you are,’” said Rue.

“‘But that’s who I am. What do you mean?’”

“‘Where are my cigarettes?’”

“Arrogant bastard. Did you?”

“What I did is irrelevant. He felt ridiculed. He thought I was being contemptuous. I was in love. I could have learned anything. Chinese is only a language. It didn’t occur to me to act stupid.”

“What you did is relevant. Did you get his cigarettes?”

“He has a bald spot in the middle of his head.”