Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

How could I have been so blind, so careless, cruel, and stupid? This was a lovely girl. I, beast and fool, adjusting my head, felt now what I should have felt then. And I felt that Henry was marvelous. “Seen any movies lately?” I asked.

She stuttered something about a movie and Henry’s impressions of it. The stutter was worse than I remembered, and now that I looked her face seemed thin, the flesh gray. In her effort not to stutter, strain showed in her neck. As if it were my habitual right, I took her hand. She continued to stutter something Henry had said about the movie, and didn’t snap her hand back. Tears formed in my nose. “Thank you,” I whispered. “F-for what?” she asked. We were near an empty lot. I turned abruptly against her, my lips quivering. She said, “Really, Phillip, I d-don’t w-want …” With a rapid hand I discovered that she wore no underpants. We fell together. I caught sight of her later as she sprinted into the darkness. Groans issued from my mouth. They flew after her like a flock of bats.

It was a week before Henry came to see me, but I was certain I had heard the bell a hundred times. Each time, I put out my cigarette and dragged to the door, ready for a punch in the face, a knife, or a bullet. In the middle of the night, I found myself sitting up in bed, my eyes large and compendious with dark as I shouted, “No, Henry, no.” Though I shouted, I had resolved to say nothing or little when he finally came. Not a word would shape my mouth if I could help it. A word would be an excuse. Even self-denunciation was beyond decent possibility. If he flung acid in my face, I would fall and say, “Thanks.” If he were out in the hall with a gun and fired point blank into my stomach, I might, as I toppled, blood sloshing through my lips, beg forgiveness. Though I merited no such opportunity, I hoped there would be time for it. If I could, while begging, keep my eyes fixed on him, it would be nice.

After three days passed and he still hadn’t come, I thought of hanging myself. I tied a rope to the lightbulb, made a noose, and set a chair under it. But I couldn’t, when I experimented, manage to open the door and then dash to the chair and hang myself without looking clumsy, as if I were really asking to be stopped. On the other hand, I didn’t want to practice, become graceful, and look effete. I considered poison: open the door, hello, down it goes, goodbye. Or fire: set myself on fire and shrivel, spitting curses on my head.

Despite all this I slept well most of the week, and on several nights I dreamed of Marjorie. We did it every time. “Is this the nature of sin?” I asked. “This is nature,” she said. “Don’t talk.” I discovered a truth in these dreams: each of my feelings was much like another, pity like lust, hate like love, sorrow like joy. I wondered if there were people who could keep them neat. I supposed not. They were feelings and not to be managed. If I felt bad I felt good. That was that.

The idea made me smile. When I noticed myself smiling, I chuckled a bit, and soon I was cackling. Tears streamed out of my eyes. I had to lie on the floor to keep from sinking there. I lay for a long time digging my nails into my cheeks and thought about the nature of ideas. Pascal, Plato, Freud. I felt kin to men like that. Having ideas, seized as it were. I had had an idea.

When I heard the doorbell I knew immediately that I had heard it. The ring was different from the phony ringing during the week. It was substantial, moral, piercing. It set me running to answer, dashing between tables and chairs, leaping a sofa, lunging down the hall to come flying to the ringing door, where I swerved and came back to where I had been. A voice more primitive than any noise the body makes, said:

“Let the son of a bitch ring.”

My lips slid up my teeth, my ears flattened to the skull. I found myself crouching. Muscles bunched in my shoulders. I felt a shuddering stiffness in my thighs. Tight as bow strings, tendons curled the bones of my hands to claws. The bell continued to ring, and a hot, ragged tongue slapped across my muzzle. I smelled the sweet horror of my breath. It bristled my neck and sent me gliding low to the ringing door, a noiseless animal, blacker and more secret than night.

Henry out there stood dying in his shoes, ringing in gruesome demise. My paws lifted and lopped down softly. Blood poured me, slow as steaming tar, inevitably toward the door. My paw lay on the knob. It turned. I tugged. Nothing happened. He rang. I shouted, “Can’t open it. Give a shove.” I tugged, Henry shoved. I twisted the knob and he flung himself against the other side. A panel dislodged. I had a glimpse of his face, feverish and shining. A blaze of white teeth cut the lower half. The door stayed shut. We yelled to one another.

“All right. Give it everything.”

“Here we go.”

The door opened.

Henry stood in the hall, looking straight into my eyes. The crooked nose, the blue eyes. The physical man. Nothing I felt, absolutely nothing, could accommodate the fact of him. I wondered if it was actually Henry, and I looked rapidly about his face, casting this and that aside like a man fumbling through his wallet for his driver’s license while the trooper grimly waits. Nothing turned up to name him Henry. Even the familiar tooth left me unimpressed. Henry’s features made no more sense than a word repeated fifty times. The physical man, Henry, Henry, Henry, Henry. Nothing. I wanted to cry and beg him to be Henry again, but only snickered and stepped back. He came inside. I took a package of cigarettes from my pocket and offered it to him. He stared, then shook his head. The movement was trivial, but it was no. No! It startled me into sense. I put the cigarettes back into my pocket and sighed. The breath ran out slowly, steadily, like sand through an hourglass. This was it. He followed with a sigh of his own, then said, “I guess this is it.”

“I guess,” I murmured, “it is.”

“Yes,” he said, “it is,” and took a long, deep breath, as if drawing up the air I had let out.

I began to strangle. Neither of us spoke. I coughed. He cleared his throat in a sympathetic reflex. I coughed. He cleared his throat once more. I coughed a third time, and he waited for me to stop, but I continued to cough. I was barely able to see, though my eyes bulged. He asked if I wanted a glass of water. I nodded and doubled forward wiping my bulging eyes. When he returned with the water I seized it and drank. He asked if I wanted another glass. I said, “No thanks,” coughed again, a rasping, rotten-chested hack. He rushed for another glass. I saw it trembling in his hand. His sleeve was wet to the elbow. “Thanks,” I said, and seized it.

“Go on, go on, drink.”

I drank.

“Finish it,” he urged.

I finished it slowly.

“You ought to sit down.”

I went to a chair and sat down. My head rolled in a dull, feeble way, and a moment passed in silence. Then he said:

“There has been enough of this.”

I stood up instantly.

He looked at me hard. I tried to look back equally hard, as if his look were an order that I do the same. His height and sharp little eyes gave him the advantage. “Yes,” I said, shaking my head yes.

“Months of it. Enough!”

“I’m responsible,” I muttered, and that put force into my look. “All my fault,” I said, force accumulating.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t blame you for anything. You want to kill me and I don’t blame you for that. I’m no friend. I betrayed you.”

“Kill you?”

“I came here expecting death. I am determined to settle for nothing less.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Absurd? Is it so absurd to want justice? Is it so absurd to ask the friend one has betrayed to do for one the only possible thing that will purge one?”