The Complete Stories

by Bernard Malamud

“Do I sound hokey?”

  “I wouldn’t say so.” Max was affected by her.

  She lowered the shades, switched out the lights, quietly closed the door.

  “Come see my study.”

  It was a light-curtained lavender room with a desk, portable sewing machine, and a circle of snapshots on the wall before her. Her father, who had sold insurance in Columbus, Ohio, was dead. There he was, fifty, standing in front of his automobile. The sad-faced mother had posed in her flower garden. A shot of Karla taken in college showed an attractive, sober girl with wire-frame glasses, dark eyes and brows, firm full lips. Her desk was cluttered with books, sheet music, shopping lists, correspondence.

  She wanted to know if Adler had any children.

  “No.” He told her he had been married a short time and divorced long ago.

  “You never remarried?”

  “No.”

  “Clem married me when I was very young,” Karla said.

  “Didn’t you marry him?”

  “I mean I hardly knew what I was doing.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Marrying me when I was very young.”

  She raised the shade and stared into the night. A streetlight in the distance glowed through the wet window. “I always give dinner parties on rainy nights.”

  She said they ought to go down to the others but then opened the closet door and got out a large glossy photograph of a one-family dwelling project she had done in her architecture class with Harris.

  Max said it showed promise. Karla smiled wryly.

  “Really,” he said.

  “I love your work,” she said. “I love the chances you take.”

  “If they work out right.”

  “They do, they do.” She seemed to be trembling.

  They embraced forcefully. She dug her body into his. They kissed wet-mouthed, then she broke with an embarrassed laugh.

  “They’ll be wondering.”

  “He’s still on the phone,” Max said, aroused.

  “We’d better go down.”

  “What’s Shirley to him?”

  “A tight-jawed bitch.”

  “To him, I said.”

  “He’s sorry for her. Her fourteen-year-old kid is on LSD. He’s sorry for everybody.”

  They kissed again, then Karla stepped out of his embrace and they went downstairs.

  Harris was off the phone.

  “I showed him our babies,” Karla said to her husband.

  “Showoff,” smiled Harris.

  “Lovely children,” said Max.

  Shirley winked at him.

  I’ve lost the right to his friendship, the architect thought. A minute later he thought, Things change, they have to.

  “Now please stay put for a few minutes,” Harris said to Karla. “Catch your breath.”

  “First I have to pay Stephanie.”

  Harris went to his den and returned with a box of color transparencies of his renovation project for a slum-housing improvement group: before and after.

  Max, his mind on Karla, examined the slides, holding each to the light. He said it was work well done.

  Harris said he was gratified that Max approved.

  Karla was paying Stephanie in the kitchen. Ralph Lewin, smoking a cigar, also looked at the slides, although he said he was the one who had originally taken them. Ada and Shirley were on the green sofa on the right side of the room, Ada seriously listening as Shirley went on about her son on LSD.

  Karla carried in a silver trayful of bone-china cups and saucers.

  “I’m always late with coffee,” she remarked.

  “Make mine tea,” said Ralph.

  She said she would get the tea in a minute.

  As she handed out the coffee cups she slipped Adler a note with his.

  He read it in the bathroom. “Pretend you’re going to the bathroom, then go left in the back hall and you’ll come out in the kitchen.”

  He went to the left in the hall and came out in the kitchen.

  They kissed with passion.

  “Where can we meet?”

  “When?” Max asked.

  “Tonight, maybe? I’m not sure.”

  “Is there a motel around?”

  “Two blocks away.”

  “I’ll get a room if you can make it. If not tonight, I could stay on till tomorrow noon. I’ve got to be in Boston by evening.”

  “I think I can. Clem and I are in separate bedrooms right now. He sleeps like dead. I’ll let you know before you leave.”

  “Just give me a sign,” Max said. “Don’t write any notes.”

  “Don’t you like them?” Karla asked.

  “I do but they’re risky. What if he sees you passing me one?”

  “It might do him good.”

  “I don’t want any part of that,” Max said.

  “I like to write notes,” said Karla. “I like to write to people I like. I like to write things that suddenly occur to me. My diary was full of exciting thoughts when I was young.”

  “All I’m saying is it could be dangerous. Just give me a sign or say something before I leave and I’ll wait till you come.”

  “I burned my diary last summer but I still write notes. I’ve always written notes to people. You have to let me be who I am.”

  He asked her why she had burned her diary.

  “I had to. It beat me up badly.” She burst into tears.

  Adler left the kitchen and returned to the bathroom. He flushed the toilet, washed his hands, and reappeared in the living room. At the same moment, Karla, her face composed, brought in Ralph’s tea.

  For a while they talked politics across the room. Then the talk went to music and Harris put on a new recording he had bought of Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer.” Despite the singing, Shirley talked earnestly to Ralph Lewin, who suppressed a yawn now and then. Ada and Karla were chatting about the Lewins’ new house they were about to build in the spring, and Harris and Adler, on the long beige couch, discussed developments in architecture. “I might as well turn off the music,” Harris said. After he had put the record away he returned and, resuming their conversation, characterized Adler’s latest work as his most daring.

  “That’s a quality you inspired me to.”

  “In moderation.”

  Adler said he appreciated his mentor’s sentiments. He felt for the first time he did not know what to say to him and it made him uncomfortable. He was now not sure whether to urge Karla to try to get out of the house tonight. On the one hand he had gratitude and loyalty to Harris to contend with; on the other he felt as though he were in love with her.

  They managed to meet alone at the fireplace, when to his strange surprise she whispered, “Something’s coming your way,” and surreptitiously touched his hand with a folded slip of paper. Turning away from the company, Adler managed to read it, then thrust it into his pants pocket.

  Karla’s note said: “Can someone love someone she doesn’t know?”

  “We do it all the time.”

  “Partly I think I love you because I love your work.”

  “Don’t confuse me with my work,” Adler said. “It would be a mistake.”

  “It’s on for tonight,” she whispered.

  As they stood side by side with their backs to the fireplace they reached behind them and squeezed hands.

  Karla, glancing across the room at her husband, excused herself to go up to see if the babies were covered. Adler, after she had gone, tried to think of a reason to follow her upstairs, but the impulse was insane. It was past eleven and he felt nervously expectant.

  When Karla came down from the nursery he heard her say to her husband, “Clem, I’m having some anxiety.”

  “Take a pill,” Harris advised.

  Adler then seriously wondered whether to tell her to cool it for tonight. It might be better to call her from the motel in the morning, when Harris was gone, and if she still felt she could they would meet then. But he doubted, if they didn’t get toge
ther tonight, that she could make it in the morning. So he decided to urge her to come as soon as she was sure her husband was asleep.

  She wants someone young for a change, he thought. It will be good for her.

  Wanting to tell her the anxiety would go once they were in bed together, Max sat down beside her on the green sofa, where she was listening distantly to Shirley saying the drug situation had made her frantic. He waited impatiently for one or the other to get up so that he could say what he had to to Karla. Harris, standing nearby, conversing with Ada, seemed to be listening to Shirley. Karla pretended to be unaware of Adler by her side; but after a minute he felt her hand groping for his pocket. Without wanting to he moved away.

  Adler, just then, expected his pocket to burst into flame. She’ll write them forever, he thought; that’s her nature. If not to me, then to the next one who comes into the house who’s done something she wishes she had. He made up his mind to return the note unread. At the same time, with a dismaying sense of sudden loss, Adler realized he couldn’t read it if he wanted to because the paper hadn’t gone into his pocket but had fallen to the floor. The sight of the folded yellow paper at his feet sickened the architect. Karla was staring at it as though reliving a dream. She had written it upstairs in her study and it said, “Darling, I can’t meet you, I am six months pregnant.”

  Before either of them could move to retrieve the paper, or even let it lie where it had fallen, Shirley had plucked it up.

  “Did you drop this?” she asked Clem Harris.

  Adler’s head was thick with blood. He felt childlike and foolish. I’m disgraced and deserve it.

  But Harris did not unfold the paper. He handed it to his former student. “It isn’t mine, is it yours?”

  “An address I wrote down,” Adler said. He rose. “I have this early train to Boston to catch in the morning.”

  Ada and Ralph Lewin were the first to say good night.

  “Bon voyage,” said Shirley.

  Harris brought Adler’s coat and helped him on with it. They shook hands cordially.

  “The air shuttle is the fastest way to Boston.”

  Max said he thought that was how he would go. He then said goodbye to Karla. “Thanks for having me.”

  “Love, marriage, happiness,” Karla sang, standing in her crocheted short mini on the stairs.

  She runs up to her babies in the nursery.

  1973

  In Retirement

  He had lately taken to studying his old Greek grammar of fifty years ago. He read in Bulfinch and wanted to reread the Odyssey in Greek. His life had changed. He slept less these days and in the morning got up to stare at the sky over Gramercy Park. He watched the clouds until they took shapes he could reflect on. He liked strange, haunted vessels, and he liked to watch mythological birds and animals. He had noticed that if he contemplated these forms in the clouds, could keep his mind on them for a while, there might be a diminution of his morning depression. Dr. Morris was sixty-six, a physician, retired for two years. He had shut down his practice in Queens and moved to Manhattan. He had retired himself after a heart attack, not too serious but serious enough. It was his first attack and he hoped his last, though in the end he hoped to go quickly. His wife was dead and his daughter lived in Scotland. He wrote her twice a month and heard from her twice a month. And though he had a few friends he visited, and kept up with medical journals, and liked museums and theater, generally he contended with loneliness. And he was concerned about the future; the future was by old age possessed.

  After a light breakfast he would dress warmly and go out for a walk around the Square. That was the easy part of the walk. He took this walk even when it was very cold, or nasty rainy, or had snowed several inches and he had to proceed very carefully. After the Square he crossed the street and went down Irving Place, a tall figure with a cape and cane, and picked up his Times. If the weather was not too bad he continued on to Fourteenth Street, around to Park Avenue South, up Park and along East Twentieth back to the narrow, tall, white stone apartment building he lived in. Rarely, lately, had he gone in another direction though when on the long walk he stopped at least once on the way, perhaps in front of a mid-block store, perhaps at a street corner, and asked himself where else he might go. This was the difficult part of the walk. What was difficult was that it made no difference which way he went. He now wished he had not retired. He had become more conscious of his age since his retirement, although sixty-six was not eighty. Still it was old. He experienced moments of anguish.

  One morning after his rectangular long walk in the rain, he found a letter on the rubber mat under the line of mailboxes in the lobby. It was a narrow, deep lobby with false green marble columns and several bulky chairs where few people ever sat. Dr. Morris had seen a young woman with long hair, in a white raincoat and maroon shoulder bag, carrying a plastic bubble umbrella, hurry down the vestibule steps and leave the house as he was about to enter. In fact he held the door open for her and got a breath of her bold perfume. He did not remember seeing her before and felt a momentary confusion as to who she might be. He later imagined her taking the letter out of her box, reading it hastily, then stuffing it into the maroon cloth purse she carried over her shoulder; but she had stuffed in the envelope and not the letter.

  That had fallen to the floor. He imagined this as he bent to retrieve it. It was a folded sheet of heavy white writing paper, written on in black ink in a masculine hand. The doctor unfolded and glanced at it without making out the salutation or any of its contents. He would have to put on his reading glasses, and he thought Flaherty, the doorman and elevator man, might see him if the elevator should suddenly descend. Of course Flaherty might think the doctor was reading his own mail, except that he never read it, such as it was, in the lobby. He did not want the man thinking he was reading someone else’s letter. He also thought of handing him the letter and describing the young woman who had dropped it. Perhaps he could return it to her? But for some reason not at once clear to him the doctor slipped it into his pocket to take upstairs to read. His arm began to tremble and he felt his heart racing at a rate that bothered him.

  After the doctor had got his own mail out of the box—nothing more than the few medical circulars he held in his hand—Flaherty took him up to the fifteenth floor. Flaherty spelled the night man at 8 a.m. and was himself relieved at 4 p.m. He was a slender man of sixty with sparse white hair on his half-bald head, who had lost part of his jaw under the left ear after two bone operations. He would be out for a few months; then return, the lower part of the left side of his face partially caved in; still it was not a bad face to look at. Although the doorman never spoke of his ailment, the doctor knew he was not done with cancer of the jaw, but of course he kept this to himself; and he sensed when the man was concealing pain.

  This morning, though preoccupied, he asked, “How is it going, Mr. Flaherty?”

  “Not too tough.”

  “Not a bad day.” He said this, thinking not of the rain but of the letter in his pocket.

  “Fine and dandy,” Flaherty quipped. On the whole he moved and talked animatedly, and was careful to align the elevator with the floor before letting passengers off. Sometimes the doctor wished he could say more to him than he usually did; but not this morning.

  He stood by the large double window of his living room overlooking the Square, in the dull rainy-day February light, in pleasurable excitement reading the letter he had found, the kind he had anticipated it might be. It was a letter written by a father to his daughter, addressed to “Dear Evelyn.” What it expressed after an irresolute start was the father’s dissatisfaction with his daughter’s way of life. And it ended with an exhortatory paragraph of advice: “You have slept around long enough. I don’t understand what you get out of that type of behavior anymore. I think you have tried everything there is to try. You claim you are a serious person but let men use you for what they can get. There is no true payoff to you unless it is very temporary, and the real payof
f to them is that they have got themselves an easy lay. I know how they think about this and how they talk about it in the lavatory the next day. Now I want to urge you once and for all that you ought to be more serious about your life. You have experimented long enough. I honestly and sincerely and urgently advise you to look around for a man of steady habits and good character who will marry you and treat you like the person I believe you want to be. I don’t want to think of you anymore as a drifting semi-prostitute. Please follow this advice, the age of twenty-nine is no longer sixteen.” The letter was signed “Your Father,” and under his signature, another sentence, in neat small handwriting, was appended: “Your sex life fills me full of fear. Mother.”

  The doctor put the letter away in a drawer. His excitement had left him and he felt ashamed of having read it. He was sympathetic to the father, and at the same time sympathetic to the young woman, though perhaps less so to her. After a while he tried to study his Greek grammar but could not concentrate. The letter remained in his mind like a billboard sign as he was reading the Times, and he was conscious of it throughout the day, as though it had aroused in him some sort of expectation he could not define. Sentences from it would replay themselves in his thoughts. He reveried the young woman as he had imagined her after reading what the father had written, and as the woman—was she Evelyn?—he had seen coming out of the house. He could not be certain the letter was hers. Perhaps it was not; still he thought of it as belonging to her, the woman he had held the door for whose perfume still lingered in his senses.

  That night, thoughts of her kept him from falling asleep. “I’m too old for this nonsense.” He got up to read and was able to concentrate, but when his head lay once more on the pillow, a long freight train of thoughts provocative of her rumbled by, drawn by a long black locomotive. He pictured Evelyn, the drifting semi-prostitute, in bed with various lovers, engaged in various acts of sex. Once she lay alone, erotically naked, her maroon cloth purse drawn close to her nude body. He also thought of her as an ordinary girl with many fewer lovers than her father seemed to think. This was probably closer to the truth. He wondered if he could be useful to her in some way. He felt a fright he could not explain but managed to dispel it by promising himself to burn the letter in the morning. The freight train, with its many cars, clattered along in the foggy distance. When the doctor awoke at 10 a.m. on a sunny winter’s morning, there was no awareness, light or heavy, of his morning depression.