Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

Felicity said, “Oh, ha, ha. I like gum, too.”

She understood what he felt. Nachman realized she was trying to connect; trying to make him feel all right. Instantly Nachman searched his pockets for another stick of gum. He found none. Felicity’s smile saddened and became an ironical little pout, and she opened her eyes wide and shook her head No, No, as if sympathizing with a child, and then said, “Ha, ha, ha,” a high and utterly artificial laugh, but with such goodwill that Nachman laughed, too, and they laughed together as Nachman said goodbye, leaving the barbershop with a sense that he’d been forgiven.

TRAFFIC MIGHT MOVE AT ANY MOMENT. He might still get to the dentist on time, but Nachman was pessimistic and assumed he would miss his appointment. He imagined himself apologizing to Gudrun, the dentist’s assistant, a pale Norwegian woman in her forties with white-blond hair. Nachman could almost hear his ingratiating tone. He was begging Gudrun to forgive him, swearing it would never happen again, when he felt himself being watched. He looked to his left. From the car next to his, a young woman stared at him. She looked away immediately and pretended to chat on a cell phone, as though indifferent to Nachman, who now stared at her. He saw heavy makeup and chemical-red hair. She was smoking a cigarette and tapping the steering wheel with her thumb, keeping time to music on her car radio. Nachman imagined reaching into her car, snatching away her cell phone and cigarette, turning off her radio, and ordering her to sit still. She would soon be reduced to quivering lunacy. Drivers in Los Angeles shoot each other for no reason, let alone rude staring.

Of course, Nachman would never shoot anybody. He pitied the woman who encumbered her head with a cell phone, cigarette, music, and unnatural colors. Compared to her, Nachman was a sublime being. He could sit for hours in silence, alone in his office, with only pencil and paper. Thinking. In fact, there was pencil and paper in the glove compartment. Nachman’s car could be his office. He would do math problems. Millions were stalled and rotting in their cars in Los Angeles, but Nachman had internal resources.

He leaned toward the glove compartment, and just as he touched the release button, his eye was drawn by a flash of black hair. He looked. Adele Novgorad, the wife of Nachman’s best and oldest friend, Norbert Novgorad, was standing on the sidewalk. Nachman wanted to cry out her name, but hesitated. He was sure it was Adele, though she was turned away from him. Few people in Los Angeles had such wonderfully black hair or skin so white. She was talking to a man who had an unusually large and intimidating mustache, and they stood close together — too close — facing each other in front of a motel, about ten yards from Nachman’s car. Horns blared behind Nachman. He heard the horns, but they meant nothing. Adele and the man had begun kissing.

Horns screamed, and at last they pierced Nachman’s trance. He looked away from Adele to the road, but for Nachman, still shocked by what he had seen, the avenue, the traffic, the buildings were all meaningless. He clutched the steering wheel. Fairfax Avenue was clear for a thousand yards straight ahead, but he didn’t step on the gas pedal. He looked back at Adele. She had stopped kissing the man, though she still clung to him; the man had now heard the horns and was looking over her shoulder at Nachman’s car. When the man’s eyes met his, Nachman stepped on the gas pedal and released the clutch. In the rearview mirror, he saw Adele separate from the man. He was pointing at Nachman’s car. Adele looked. Having seen too much, Nachman had been seen.

Driving south down Fairfax Avenue, Nachman felt something like the thrill of departure, as when a boat leaves the shore, but the thrill was unpleasant. He seemed to be departing from himself, or everything familiar to himself. Through the blur of feeling, a voice spoke to him: “You must tell Norbert what you saw on Fairfax Avenue.” It was Nachman’s own voice, commanding and severe.

He could drive to the community college where Norbert was a professor. And then what? Interrupt his lecture or a department meeting to tell him that he had seen Adele kissing someone? How ridiculous. Besides, if he told Norbert,Adele would hate him. She, too, was his friend. She had invited Nachman to dinner many times, and she always gave him a tight hug and a kiss when he arrived and again when he left, pressing her warm lips against his cheek. She cooked special dishes for Nachman. To please her, he cried out with pleasure at the first bite, and when she looked gratified, he took more delight in her expression than in the food. With her cooking and hugs and kisses, Adele made Nachman feel very important to her. He liked Adele enormously. The way she walked with her toes pointed out like Charlie Chaplin was adorable. He also got a kick out of her smile, which was usually accompanied by a frown, as if happiness were a pleasant form of melancholy. Nachman wanted sometimes to lean across the dinner table and kiss the lines in her brow. He suddenly heard himself speak again, in a cruel voice, as if he were a stranger to himself and had no regard for his feelings about Adele: “You must tell Norbert what you saw on Fairfax Avenue.”

Nachman hammered the dashboard with his fist and shouted an obscenity. In the twenty-first century in Los Angeles, a great city of cars where no conceivable depravity wasn’t already boring to high school kids, Nachman, a grown man, found himself agonized by an ancient moral dilemma.

Was it his duty to tell Norbert or to protect Adele? Would it make any difference if he told Norbert? Yes, it would make a difference. Nachman would seem like a messenger worse than the message. The friendship would be ruined. Nachman forced himself to ask: did he want to hurt his friend Norbert? There was no reason to tell him unless he wanted to hurt him. People who told unbearable news to friends, as if it were their duty, then felt very good about themselves while their friends felt miserable — Nachman was not like those people. Besides, to feel good about oneself was important only to narcissists, not Nachman. Nachman loved his friend Norbert and would sooner cut off his own arm than hurt him just to feel good about himself. In the righteous fervor of his thinking, Nachman forgot his dental appointment.

He drove to the ocean and turned toward Malibu. He barely noticed that he was driving well beyond his house. After a while, he saw a place to stop. He parked close to the beach and left his car. In his shoes, he trudged along the sand. The ocean was a sheet of glinting metallic brilliance. Gulls were dark blades soaring in the white glare of the afternoon sun. For the gulls, light was no different from air. For Nachman the difference between one thing and another was the most serious consideration in life. The gulls brought this home to him with terrible poignancy. He remembered his first lesson in mathematics, when he learned about differences.

After his parents divorced, when Nachman was five, his mother’s aunt Natasha Lurie had moved in with Nachman and his mother. She was a small elderly woman from Saint Petersburg, Russia, and had been a well-known mathematician in her youth. She decided to teach Nachman mathematics, and began the lesson by asking him, in a soft tired voice, to write the word “mathematics.” Nachman wrote it phonetically, with an a in the middle. Natasha, who reminded him of clothes hanging on a line, susceptible to the least touch of the wind, took Nachman’s pencil out of his fingers. Pinching the pencil between her own skinny white fingers, she dragged the eraser back and forth on the paper, back and forth, until the a was obliterated. Then she drew a round and perfect e, pushing the pencil point into the fiber of the paper and pulling the shape of the letter, like a small worm, slowly into view. More than four decades later, trudging on the beach in Malibu, Nachman saw again the red rims of Aunt Natasha’s ancient eyes. She looked at Nachman to see if he understood. The lesson had little to do with spelling or mathematics. She taught him there is a right way. It applied to everything.