The Men's Club

by Leonard Michaels

  Terry sat opposite me. Small muscles rippled in his bald front. He chewed pecan pie, crushed the sticky nuts to pulp. To my left, Berliner sat hunched, heavy with deliberation, sipping his marijuana. Paul had rolled the cigarette, then passed it to him with a conspiratorial wink. They were simpatico. Drug brothers. To Paul’s left sat Harold Canterbury – lean, pale, static. He watched Paul twist a new paper around a pile of desiccated grass. To Canterbury’s left, at the end of the table, big Cavanaugh. Bottle of wine before him, neck enveloped in his hand. The sheen of eating made his cheeks look swollen and metallic, his head monumental, dominating silver, glass, ruined meats – chicken, salmon, various pâtés – and marijuana smoke winding above the devastation like an Oriental melody. Slow, pythonic weight. How I felt, beneath my exhilaration, having eaten too much. My body was a philosopher brooding on multitudes within as I gazed at a salad bowl just beyond my plate. Green shreds clung to the inner spin like leaves in a storm. Nobody spoke for several minutes and then Berliner said, after drawing marijuana essence into himself and savouring fine effects, ‘Good grass.’ Paul nodded. These two, beyond the rest of us, were feeling things. Berliner nodded back at Paul, sealing their communion, his white hair rising about his head like brain gas, so startling I couldn’t imagine how he sold anyone a house. But of course the market was red-hot in California. A leper could sell a house. Kramer, at the end of the table opposite Cavanaugh, said, ‘Anyone care for coffee?’ Nobody answered. There came only the sedulous crush of Terry’s face, still eating. In the hazel eyes an eating look. Alert and blind. I stared at him in a particular way. Square shoulders. Round head. He had great physical integrity. When he ate, he ate, and he was made of fundamental shapes; peasant blood. Durable laborious strength lay beneath his mauve silk shirt. It complicated him with elegance, a feminine flow against his bulk. He moaned when he swallowed, as if his pleasure were so serious it could be expressed as pain. As the pie went down, his eyelids lowered. He appeared to swoon, to suffer deliciously. Beside his head the hand holding the fork looked small. Thick stunted thumb. Not a clever thumb, but strong-willed, capable of gouging, strangling. I remembered him telling us he was a doctor. Though he was only eating pie, I could have watched him for hours. Perhaps anyone thrown together with anyone else is community. I wondered if we ever really have to talk. Full of food, I was full of an approving spirit. We make discriminations; we marry a pretty face, good brains, a sense of humour. All such discriminations seemed vicious now. Terry, about to raise another piece of pie to his mouth, stopped. Looking at the pie, he said, ‘There was a woman who liked to taste my food in restaurants. Deborah Zeller. I went out with her for months. I almost married her, but something happened.’

  I could have said, ‘I was just thinking about marriage,’ but the coincidence was dull, a conversational dead end. I kept my mouth shut and waited. Terry looked for a response. He saw, in the bloated physiology of this hour, men too thick with sugars to want Deborah Zeller, a name of trills and thrusts. It hung in general density, then ceased when I heard the hum of a machine coming through the wall between dining room and kitchen. It was the refrigerator. Standing alone, raped, resonant with humiliation. Our ice mother. We’d seized her food.

  A crime.

  A crime for sure, but our very table – long pink heart of exotic wood – was also seized. A virtual tree ripped from the monkey jungles. Planed flat, sanded, oiled, rubbed until death yielded a mellow patina. The grain swirled like a river, forever moving and forever still. Aestheticised. As for our monkey kin, they stumbled on the ground. The jungle was gone. They were homeless, perishing; but the table was lovely and we were oblivious to any desperation. Brotherhood is exclusive, not universal. Freud says it’s based on murder. He goes too far. Any dope can see, when beings unite, other beings die. A pride of lions is bad for zebras. A herd of zebras means less grass for cows. ‘Kramer,’ I said, ‘where did you get this table? I want one.’

  Kramer stirred in his darkness. Black hair, black eyes, tattooed forearms were turning towards me. ‘I want one,’ I said again, even as I lost interest in the thing.

  ‘I bought it at Madera Shapes.’ He rubbed the surface like a sensitive skin and I felt as if I’d praised his child. ‘I use tung oil on it.’

  Berliner laughed. ‘You lick the table?’

  ‘T-U-N-G. Tung oil. From a tree down South, from the nut.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Berliner, pinching the dregs of his marijuana, sucking it with sharply puckered lips. He took in the information about tung oil as he peered down the ridge of medial septum, his nostrils spreading, pulling with his eyes. Such difficulty and need. It suggested a woman’s groin, distended, hauling her lover inside. I turned to Terry. ‘You say this woman, Deborah Zeller, tasted your food?’

  Berliner collapsed, expelling smoke as if punctured.

  ‘Graduate student in anthropology. Perhaps you knew her?’

  ‘I knew a woman who liked to wear my clothes. She’d also sit on the edge of the tub and watch me shave. I watched her, too, but not the same way. I didn’t want to be her.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Berliner. ‘She put on your clothes and you put on hers. I like to wear my wife’s panties.’ He laughed, coughing smoke. ‘It’s natural. My wife once tried on my jock.’

  Paul said, ‘She must be fashion-conscious.’

  ‘Right, the whole thing is about getting naked.’ Berliner was thrilled by what he understood. The drug had mined his brain, delivering this truth to his mouth. He looked at us for acknowledgement.

  Paul said, ‘Yeah.’ He sounded hopeful, willing to understand. ‘What whole thing, man?’

  ‘The fashion industry. It’s about getting naked.’ He waited for Paul, nodding at him, urging him to find this brilliance in himself.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, but why do you think so?’

  ‘When we have an argument,’ said Cavanaugh to nobody, ‘Sarah undresses in the bathroom.’

  ‘That so?’ said Terry. ‘Nicki dressed when we had an argument. She’d put on makeup, fix her hair. I could be making a major statement about our marriage when I notice she is digging in the dresser for stockings. Next she is going out the door, car keys in her hand, as if she has a date. Then varrrroom, she’s peeling rubber, taking off down the street.’

  Cavanaugh sighed. ‘I didn’t mean Sarah undresses when we have an argument.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I mean I don’t even know she’s mad until she starts undressing in the bathroom, the door shut.’

  ‘I get it,’ said Terry, grinning.

  ‘One time we were in the bedroom undressing. An argument started. She was naked by then. She grabbed up the blanket and top sheet, flung it around herself, and stood there yelling at me. I was so touched I started loving her, middle of her yelling. I couldn’t hear the words. My dick was pointing at her like she’d been out of town for a month. I tried to concentrate on what she was saying. She said I made her feel like throwing up. Like I was my dick.’

  Cavanaugh laughed. Faces became sharp, wolfish, laughing with him, as if we’d seized an unexpected permission.

  Berliner said, ‘The best place for being naked is New York.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Paul, ‘I know what you mean.’ He was anxious to make up for his failure a moment ago. ‘So many people. You get naked just to know you exist. Right?’

  ‘No, man. I mean the energy. You ever make it in Manhattan, around midtown?’

  Paul snapped his fingers. ‘That’s where it’s at.’

  ‘You made it there?’

  ‘No.’ He was smiling, shaking his head yes. ‘But it sounds right.’ He shrugged, his smile feeble, helpless. Smallest man in the room. Bird neck. Finicky fingers. Feelings came quickly to his face. It seemed fragile, easy to hurt. To rescue him, I said, ‘Berliner, when I get home I’ll wake my wife and ask her to slip into my jock.’

  The green eyes released Paul, fixed on me, clicked towards a grim conclusion. Somewhere in his electricity he had my number. ‘Y
ou promise?’

  I didn’t know if I promised. I smiled at him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re an asshole. You want your wife to wear a jock.’

  He was smirking; triumphant. I wished he’d look at someone else. Kramer then said, ‘Terry, what about Deborah Zeller?’

  ‘I’m ashamed.’ Terry was grinning. The word tickled him.

  The word toppled Kramer into perplexity dark as himself. ‘This is the twentieth century,’ he said, glancing around the table, seeking consensus. ‘You shouldn’t feel that way. In this club we tell everything. The whole point of being here.’

  ‘True, but I’m ashamed.’ He meant embarrassed, I supposed. He was being slightly coy.

  ‘Have more wine,’ said Cavanaugh, noble face way up there, comprehensive as the sky. It seemed to mean: Look how I am. I talked about my wife and dick and I’m all right. Then he glanced down, studied his wineglass, rocking it, the stem pressed into the crotch of his thumb. He narrowed within himself; a hard, interior focus. Looking up at Berliner, then Paul, he said, ‘Every time you guys light a marijuana, I think you don’t like your bodies. I always liked my body.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Berliner. ‘It made you a lot of money. I have an ulcer. You ever have trouble, Cavanaugh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Paul. ‘My body has cost me a lot of money. I had asthma when I was a kid. I had a back operation. Wherever I travel, I get the local disease. Viruses meet me at the airport. I went to visit my sister in Kentucky and came home with chiggers. For days I was scratching my legs. My union had a conference in Hawaii. Like a paid vacation. I took my wife. First night in the hotel, I get bitten by a scorpion. I think there’s about one scorpion in Hawaii. You ever have trouble like that, Cavanaugh? So I smoke a little grass. It rips off the top of my head. The less body the better, as far as I’m concerned.’

  Cavanaugh listened with a flat, unfriendly expression, as if he’d been taken by an access of bad will. It was hard to understand. I knew he’d drunk more than the rest of us, but he was huge and Irish; he could drink all night without poisoning his soul. Maybe he could be mean, but I’d never seen that in him, only the great athlete and gentle giant, the man who wanted his kids not to look like him.

  He spoke to Paul now and it became clear that his expression had nothing to do with Paul or Berliner.

  ‘I played ball for years. No tendonitis, no ruptures, no breaks, no sprains – and lately I have trouble with sleep. Put my head on the pillow and black out. I don’t go to sleep. I faint.’

  Cavanaugh – superb in speed and strength, adored by millions – was sorry for himself. Paul and Berliner had missed the point. Their bodies gave them trouble, but they were normal.

  ‘Who knows when he falls asleep?’ said Berliner, surprised, but speaking softly; very solicitous. ‘If I’m falling asleep and I think, “I’m falling asleep,” I wake up.’

  ‘Right, man. But for me the little trip, the nice couple of minutes between the pillow and nothing, is gone. Middle of the night – same way I blacked out – I wake up. I’m hungry. I have to go to the bathroom. I want one of Sarah’s cigarettes. I want to drink some beers, get laid, look for a fight. This can be two in the morning. I go stomping from room to room, slamming doors, turning on lights. I’m mad. I want to go outside, shake the trees, wake the birds.’

  ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ said Kramer.

  ‘I don’t take pills. I’m a country boy. I get dressed and drive to Oakland or San Francisco, or I head for the San Rafael Bridge, pushing eighty, ninety. I’m humming like a dynamo, faster than my pickup. I’m going, going hot dog, and I don’t know where I’m going. Sometimes I drive to the park, leave the pickup near the entrance, and run.’

  ‘Cold,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, cold,’ said Paul, close behind me.

  ‘It’s cold. Also dark. The trail is dim even in the moonlight. But I’ve run it so much I could run it blind. Deer standing in the meadows don’t look at me anymore. I once passed a doe who was defecating and she went right on, not even twitching an ear. As if I was irrelevant. I run so long sometimes I see colours begin, hear birds chirping in the fog.’

  I looked beyond Cavanaugh to the dining-room wall. Red velvety paper, a bloody sheen giving pressure to the whole room, walls closing in, pulsing. Too sensational. Not a room in which to try to think, but I wanted to say something. ‘What do you do then?’

  Paul muttered the same question. It seemed we asked.

  ‘I shower and dress for work. Slowly. I feel confused. I worry. Which tie to wear? Which shirt? Once I came back, my body screaming like it was permanently awake. I took a long shower and got back into bed. I had to be able to sleep. I’d run fifteen miles. Nothing happened. Sarah was curled up like a fist around an egg. Hot with sleep, gone away, sleeping with sleep. Not me. I had nothing. I wasn’t consistent with my body.’

  ‘Oh, man,’ said Berliner, as if he couldn’t bear another word. ‘You should have balled her. When I can’t sleep, I ball Sheila and conk right out.’

  ‘I started touching her. Just for company. I slid my hand along her leg and, after a while, I wanted more. I pulled her under me. She was asleep. I had an idea I could do it without waking her. I had her all arranged and was fixing to do it. She said, “Aw, Cavanaugh, for Christ’s sake. Later.” She wasn’t really awake, but I felt put down worse than if she had been. Bitter. I felt cheated, denied my natural right to sleep. I thought, Sarah and I are married to one another. In so many words: “Sarah and I are married to one another.”’

  ‘Each other,’ I said, unbalanced, unable to stop myself.

  ‘That’s what I meant. I thought how come we aren’t one flesh? You are one. I am one. I said she was a conventional bitch, not wanting to fuck me at 5 a.m. Always later. “Later” means after dinner. The meal half-digested. Dishwasher chugging in the kitchen. “Later” means the neighbour’s TV blasting in your window. One of my kids coughing in his room. You know what it’s like trying to fuck when your kid is coughing? I said she wanted to bring me down, make me do it on schedule like every married asshole in America. I was making a speech in the dark. She was curled up, her back to me. Her position. She’d gone right into it while I was talking. All of a sudden the bed dips and she’s lunging out of it, standing over me, crying. She said, “You’re doing this to torture me. Why are you torturing me? Night after night.” I pulled her down. She didn’t resist. She would have let me, but I didn’t ball her. She wouldn’t have gotten up for the kids later. I’d have had to make their breakfast and pack their lunches.’

  Cavanaugh stopped. Berliner said, ‘Yeah,’ as if relieved. The word carried other colours, too – consent, condolence, amen – like a small, squalid bouquet. Paul echoed Berliner. ‘Yeah.’

  Yeah-yeah was better than silence, but I wanted to add something. It was time to be supportive, as they say. Go out of oneself feelingly. Leap the psychic fence. Stand in Cavanaugh’s space. Let him know I feel what he feels. Properties of the heart are taxed by friendship. But I was tight. I felt implicated in Cavanaugh’s marital agonies. I’d merely listened to him and now I felt implicated. I couldn’t say that. It sounded moral.

  Kramer said the point of the club was to tell everything. Should Cavanaugh have told me about Sarah? She was my friend. I didn’t want to know what she didn’t know I knew about her. I remembered Cavanaugh with other women, especially at college parties years ago. He always left with the prettiest ones. They looked virginal and obedient beside him, going off into the sexual night. How awesome. Like a religious experience. Cavanaugh was so huge. A famous athlete with the handsome, arrogant head of a warrior. Steep cliff-like cheeks and bright small eyes, tilted, high in his face. I’d seen that structure – long vertical planes and slanted eye slits – hammered into the steel of ancient helmets. He descended from heroes. Invincible, murderous, rapacious stock. Sarah wouldn’t fuck him at 5 a.m. What had the world come to? But why should she be so accommodating? Did his lunatic hard-on even have her particularly in mi
nd? He’d begun to change; the great body was being taken from him, alienated by weird sleep rhythms. After midnight he springs from bed. He wants to fight, drink, speed, fuck. I thought of him driving the San Rafael Bridge in his pickup, ninety miles an hour, Angel Island looming in the black and moonlit bay, then the walls of San Quentin and the hills beyond. I could feel the undulations of the long bridge. My brain, trying to think what to say, wandered in images. Berliner mumbled, ‘Yeah,’ as if Cavanaugh’s trouble, like a boulder, rumbled down his soul. Then he said, ‘Sex and sleep.’ Words falling like pieces of life, dull, without relation, from disparate realms. Something came to me.

  The great complaint of women: ‘You turn over after sex and go to sleep.’ Then a sex-and-sleep story told to me by a student, Gilda Jordan, undergraduate from Malibu. Twenty years old, but with the brittle sophistication of a much older person. Tough laugh. Quick mouth. A scar like a silver hair beside her right eye. When she talked her hands were flags, agitating her bracelets, slapping at her necklace. The scar was another adornment, part of her activity, clatter, quickness. She called me by my first name. During office hours she’d stick her head in the doorway. ‘When is the final paper due?’ She’d laugh. For her, the question was absurd, unreal, as if she were a ‘student’. Her father produced movies; she’d grown up with a movie mentality. Whatever she was, she ‘was’. Except for her scar. If she sat still for a moment, it would begin quietly to insist it was a scar. I’d wave her inside. She’d take the chair beside my desk, lighting a cigarette, and all at once start to gossip about herself.

  The sex-and-sleep story came with a lot of laughs. She’d met this guy, laugh, and he inserted his penis into her. Laugh. ‘I mean we went to bed first.’ She leaned towards me, slapped my knee, laughing. ‘You hear what I said?’ Anyhow, he lay there, inside her, laugh, not moving even a little bit, laugh, laugh, laugh. Minutes passed. Then he twitched. He came. ‘Didn’t feel licit,’ she cried, laugh, oh laugh. She had to drag herself out from under him because he was asleep. She felt she’d been fucked by an insect. She laughed. I laughed. Sex wakes women – think of Sleeping Beauty – and puts men to sleep.