Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

He thought of Adele smooching on Fairfax Avenue as he trudged back to his car and drove to Santa Monica and then to his house. When he opened the door, Nachman heard the phone ringing. It continued to ring while he looked through the mail he had collected from the box attached to the front of his house. He entered his study and sat down at his rolltop desk. The phone continued ringing.

Nachman put the bills in one pile and dropped junk mail, unopened, into a wastebasket. Then he opened his personal mail. He found a request: Would Professor Nachman read the manuscript of a proposed mathematics textbook? It was being considered for publication by a major East Coast firm. The job would take many hours. Nachman would be paid five hundred dollars for his opinion and suggestions. It wasn’t much money, but he supposed he should feel honored by the request. He then found two invitations. One was to a conference on mathematical physics, in Indiana. Why had they invited Nachman? It wasn’t his specialty. The appropriate mathematicians had probably turned them down. The second invitation was for a defense job. It had to do with antiballistic-missile systems and would pay ten times what Nachman was making at the Institute of Mathematics. It was a job, Nachman supposed, that was held only by third-rate mathematicians and spies. Antiballistic missiles, indeed. Nachman felt insulted. What a terrible day. The phone was ringing. Nachman went to the bathroom and swallowed an aspirin. He then went to the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed and took off his shoes and socks. The phone on his night table was ringing.

Late-afternoon light, filtered by the leaves of an avocado tree outside his bedroom window, glowed on the pine floor and trembled like the surface of a pond. It was a beautiful and deeply pleasing light, but the roots of the magnificent avocado tree had been undermining the concrete foundation of Nachman’s house for years. He thought about that almost every day. Sooner or later, he would have to choose between the tree and the resale value of the house.

There was sand in his shoes and socks, and sand between his toes. On the night table beside the bed, the phone was ringing. Nachman lay down on his back and placed his right forearm across his eyes.

Let the foundation be torn apart. Let the house fall down. Let the phone ring. Nachman would sleep. Let the phone ring … It was impossible to sleep. Nachman sat up on the edge of his bed and lifted the receiver. He didn’t say hello.

“It’s me,” she said.

“Goodbye,” said Nachman.

“Don’t you dare hang up. You knew it was me. You could hear the ringing. You’re the only person in California who doesn’t have an answering machine. You heard the phone. Why didn’t you pick it up?”

“Between you and me, Adele, a certain subject does not exist.”

“If any subject doesn’t exist, no subject exists.”

“So we have no subjects.”

“I caused you pain. Is that it?”

“I live a simple life. Like a peasant. I go to work. After dinner I go to sleep. I have no interest in adventures.”

“We have different needs. I’m not you, Nachman. And you are not me. I couldn’t live without an answering machine or a television set.”

“O.K., leave it at that and let’s not plunge into a discussion of electronics. I have a headache.”

“I don’t want to leave it at that. I want to understand. I have great respect for your opinions.”

“Adele, I am not in the mood for a confessional orgy. I will say only this — I don’t believe that experience, for its own sake, is the highest value. Kissing in the street, in the middle of Los Angeles … For God’s sake. How could you?”

“You saw me kissing a guy. Was it a threat to your peasant simplicity?”

“In the middle of the afternoon, on Fairfax Avenue, with the bubees and zeydes walking home with grocery bags. There are limits.”

“I think you mean morals.”

“O.K., morals. Yes, morals. You have something against morals?” Nachman heard himself shouting and felt his breath coming faster.

“Morals-shmorals. It sounds to me like you think I did something to you personally.

“I saw you kissing some guy who isn’t Norbert, my best friend, who happens to be your husband. It was a spectacle of irresponsible lust performed in public, in my face — Norbert’s best friend.”

“Nachman, get ahold of yourself! How the fuck would I know that Norbert’s best friend was stopped in traffic, twenty feet away.”

“You trivialize my feelings.”

“What is it that you feel? Tell me exactly.”

“This minute, talking to you, I feel exactly as if I were betraying Norbert.”

“Oh please. Every time you look at me, you betray Norbert. When I stroll down Wilshire Boulevard, Norbert is betrayed sixty times a minute. I answer the door to the postman, Norbert has horns. This is California, not Saudi Arabia. I’m a woman on display, front and back. Do you know it’s been said that a modern woman can neither dress nor undress.”

“Who said it?”

“I don’t know, but it’s true. Look, all that matters is you and me, Nachman — we’re friends. Our conversation is not a betrayal of anybody. Aren’t we friends? I thought we were friends.”

Adele was crying.

“Of course,” said Nachman, his voice hoarse, on the verge of failure.

“Nachman, are you in love with me?” said Adele. “Is that the real problem?”

“I love many people.”

“Liar. You love your mother in San Diego, and you never talk about your father or your colleagues or the women you date. Anyhow, I said ‘in love with me.’”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It has to do with everything. Norbert is the injured party, not you. Don’t you hear yourself?”

“What should I hear?”

“Don’t be a mystery to yourself, Nachman. Maybe we all walk in darkness, shadows, mystery — I wouldn’t deny it — but you must try to understand. Of mystery there is no end. Of clarity, there is precious little.”

“Adele, you’re raving. Stop it.”

She now spoke in a rush, sniffling and sobbing, “O.K., I’ll stop, but I want to make things clear to you. The telephone is no damn good. Let’s meet at Calendar’s, near the La Brea Tar Pits. It’s a few blocks from my office. I go there for lunch. One o’clock tomorrow. If you don’t show up, Nachman, I’ll understand that you didn’t want to betray Norbert. But please do show up.”

After the phone call, Nachman felt better. Nothing had actually changed, and yet he could think more liberally about what hadn’t changed.

He continued to sit on the edge of his bed. He didn’t want to move. It seemed he could still hear Adele’s unmelodious voice, made ragged by cigarettes. Adele had urged him to examine his feelings, but he didn’t care to know too much about what he felt. After all, as soon as you know what you feel, you feel something else. No. There would be no such examination. It would end in confusion. It was enough that he felt cheered by Adele’s phone call. He admired her daring. He liked her sluggish, heavy carriage. She walked as if she had large breasts, though they were average, proportionate to her height, which was about five feet five inches. Her hips seemed to lock slowly, and then reluctantly to unlock as she walked, toes pointed outward. Nachman wanted, mindlessly, to hug her.

O.K., he thought, energized, returning to himself, the moral being. Look at the issue analytically, from Adele’s point of view. As Adele had said, people have different needs. So let’s be fair to Adele, a green-eyed Hungarian woman of considerable intelligence and nice hips. God knows why she married Norbert Novgorad.

It was obvious, Nachman suddenly realized, that the unrelenting repetitiousness of domestic life was destroying Adele. So the poor woman had been unfaithful. What was infidelity, anyhow? What was it precisely that Adele might have done? Let’s get that straight. She kissed a man? Big deal. Perhaps she had sexual intercourse? Oh, who cares? It was an imaginative experience, a mental tonic, like a trip to Paris, except of course you don’t bring back photographs of yourself in a motel room performing fellatio to show your friends. But who cares? With stunning visionary force, a picture burst into Nachman’s mind. Adele was naked, lying on her back with her wrists tied to bedposts. She smiled with vague, soporific satisfaction at Nachman, her green eyes glazed by a delirium of pleasure as she said, in her cigarette voice, “Morals-shmorals.”