The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “But that was—” I started to say, and then the funny sound of Chris’s voice caught up with me, and all the noise in my head shut off.

  “I remember,” Chris said. Then a long time went by.

  “Why did you come here, Laurel?” Chris said.

  When I didn’t answer, he said, “Why? Why did you come here? You’re old enough now to think about what you’re doing.” And I remembered I had never been alone with him before, except in his car.

  “Yes,” I said into the dead air. whatever I’d been waiting for all that time had vanished. “It’s all right.”

  “It’s all right?” Chris said furiously. “Well, good. It’s all right, then.” He was still lying on his back with his hands over his eyes, and neither of us moved. I thought I might shatter.

  Sometime in the night Chris spoke again. “Why are you angry?” he said. His voice was blurred, as if he’d been asleep. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t angry, but it seemed wrong, and I was afraid of what would happen if I did. I put my arms around him and started kissing him. He didn’t move a muscle, but I kept right on. I knew it was my only chance, and I thought that if I stopped I would have to leave. “Don’t be angry,” he said.

  Sometime in the night I sprang awake. Chris was holding my wrists behind my back with one hand and unbuttoning my shirt with the other, and his body felt very tense. “Don’t!” I said, before I understood.

  “‘Don’t!’” echoed Chris, letting go of me. He said it just the way I had, sounding just as frightened. He fell asleep immediately then, sprawled out, but I couldn’t sleep anymore, and later, when Chris spoke suddenly into the dark, I felt I’d been expecting him to. “Your parents are going to worry,” he said deliberately, as if he were reading.

  “No,” I said. I wondered how long he had been awake. “They think I’m at Maureen’s.” And then I realized how foolish it was for me to have said that.

  “They’ll worry,” he said. “They will worry. They’ll be very frightened.”

  And then I was so frightened myself that the room bulged and there was a sound in my ears like ball bearings rolling around wildly. I put my hands against my hot face, and my skin felt to me as if it belonged to a stranger. It felt like a marvel—brand-new and slightly moist—and I wondered if anyone else would ever touch it and feel what I had felt.

  “Look—” Chris said. He sounded blurry again, and helpless and sad. “Look—see how bad I am for you, Laurel? See how I make you cry?” Then he put his arms around me, and we lay there on top of the bed for a long, long time, and sometimes we kissed each other. My shirtsleeve was twisted and it hurt against my arm, but I didn’t move.

  When the night red began finally to bleach out of the sky, I touched Chris’s wrist. “I have to go now,” I said. That wasn’t true, of course. My parents would expect me to stay at Maureen’s till at least noon. “I have to be home when it gets light.”

  “Do you?” Chris said, but his eyes were closed.

  I stood up and buttoned my shirt.

  “I’ll take you to the train,” Chris said.

  At first he didn’t move, but finally he stood up, too. “I need some coffee,” he said. And when he looked at me my heart sank. He was smiling. He looked as if he wanted to start it up—start it all again.

  I went into the bathroom, so I wouldn’t be looking at Chris. There was a tub and a sink and a toilet. Chris uses them, I thought, as if that would explain something to me, but the thought was like a sealed package. Stuck in the corner of the mirror over the sink was a picture of a man’s face torn from a magazine. It was a handsome face, but I didn’t like it.

  “That’s a guy I went to high school with,” Chris said from behind me. “He’s a very successful actor now.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, and waited as long as I could. “Look—it’s almost light.”

  And in the instant that Chris glanced at the window, where in fact the faintest dawn was showing, I stepped over to the door and opened it.

  In the car, Chris seemed the way he usually did. “I’m sorry I’m so tired, honey,” he said. “I’ve been having a rough time lately. We’ll get together another time, when I’m not so hassled.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Good.” I don’t think he really remembered the things we had said in the dark.

  When we stopped at the station, Chris put his arm across me, but instead of opening the door he just held the handle. “You think I’m really weird, don’t you?” he said, and smiled at me.

  “I think you’re tired,” I said, making myself smile back. And Chris released the handle and let me out.

  I took the train through the dawn and walked from the station, pausing carefully if it looked as though someone was awake inside a house I was passing. Once a dog barked, and I stood absolutely still for minutes.

  I threw chunks from the lawn at Maureen’s window, so Carolina wouldn’t wake up, but I was afraid the whole town would be out by the time Maureen heard.

  Maureen came down the back way and got me. We each put on one of her bathrobes, and we made a pot of coffee, which is something I’m not allowed to drink.

  “What happened?” Maureen asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Maureen said. “You were there.”

  Even though my face was in my hands, I could tell Maureen was staring at me. “Well,” she said after a while. “Hey. Want to play some Clue?” She got the Clue board down from her room, and we played about ten games.

  The next week I really did stay over at Maureen’s.

  “Again?” my mother said. “We must do something for Mrs. MacIntyre. She’s been so nice to you.”

  Dougie and Kevin showed up together after Maureen and Carolina and I had eaten a barbecued chicken from the deli and Carolina had gone to her room to watch the little TV that Mrs. MacIntyre had put there. I figured it was no accident that Dougie had shown up with Kevin. It had to be a brainstorm of Maureen’s, and I thought, Well, so what. So after Maureen and Kevin went up to Maureen’s room I went into the den with Dougie. We pretty much knew from classes and books and stuff what to do, so we did it. The thing that surprised me most was that you always read in books about “stained sheets,” “stained sheets,” and I never knew what that meant, but I guess I thought it would be pretty interesting. But the little stuff on the sheet just looked completely innocuous, like Elmer’s glue, and it seemed that it might even dry clear like Elmer’s glue. At any rate, it didn’t seem like anything that Carolina would have to absolutely kill herself about when she did the laundry.

  We went back into the living room to wait, and I sat while Dougie walked around poking at things on the shelves. “Look,” Dougie said, “Clue.” But I just shrugged, and after a while Maureen and Kevin came downstairs looking pretty pleased with themselves.

  I sat while Dr. Wald finished at the machine, and I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t.

  “Am I going to go blind?” I asked him finally, after all those months.

  “What?” he said. Then he remembered to look at me and smile. “Oh, no, no. We won’t let it come to that.”

  I knew what I would find at Jake’s, but I had to go anyway, just to finish. “Have you seen Chris?” I asked one of the waitresses. “Or Mark?”

  “They haven’t been around for a while,” she said. “Sheila,” she called over to another waitress, “where’s Chris these days?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Sheila said sourly, and both of them stared at me.

  I could feel my blood traveling in its slow loop, carrying a heavy proudness through every part of my body. I had known Chris could injure me, and I had never cared how much he could injure me, but it had never occurred to me until this moment that I could do anything to him.

  Outside, it was hot. There were big bins of things for sale on the sidewalk, and horns were honking, and the sun was yellow and syrupy. I noticed two people who must have been mother and daughter, even though you couldn
’t really tell how old either of them was. One of them was sort of crippled, and the other was very peculiar looking, and they were all dressed up in stiff, cheap party dresses. They looked so pathetic with their sweaty, eager faces and ugly dresses that I felt like crying. But then I thought that they might be happy, much happier than I was, and that I just felt sorry for them because I thought I was better than they were. And I realized that I wasn’t really different from them anyhow—that every person just had one body or another, and some of them looked right and worked right and some of them didn’t—and I thought maybe it was myself I was feeling sorry for, because of Chris, or maybe because it was obvious even to me, a total stranger, how much that mother loved her homely daughter in that awful dress.

  When Mother and Penelope and I got back home, I walked over to Maureen’s house, but I decided not to stop. I walked by the playground and looked in at the fourth-grade room and the turtle that was still lumbering around its dingy aquarium, and it came into my mind how even Paul was older now than the kids who would be sitting in those tiny chairs in the fall, and I thought about all the millions and billions of people in the world, all getting older, all trapped in things that had already happened to them.

  When I was a kid, I used to wonder (I bet everyone did) whether there was somebody somewhere on the earth, or even in the universe, or ever had been in all of time, who had had exactly the same experience that I was having at that moment, and I hoped so badly that there was. But I realized then that that could never occur, because every moment is all the things that have happened before and all the things that are going to happen, and every moment is just the way all those things look at one point on their way along a line. And I thought how maybe once there was, say, a princess who lost her mother’s ring in a forest, and how in some other galaxy a strange creature might fall, screaming, on the shore of a red lake, and how right that second there could be a man standing at a window overlooking a busy street, aiming a loaded revolver, but how it was just me, there, after Chris, staring at that turtle in the fourth-grade room and wondering if it would die before I stopped being able to see it.

  Rafe’s Coat

  One sparkly evening not long after my husband and I had started divorce proceedings, Rafe stopped by for a drink before taking me out to dinner. In his hand was a spray of flowers, and on his face was an expression of inward alertness, and both of these things I suspected to be accoutrements of love.

  “Marvelous new coat,” I said. “Alpaca, yes?”

  “Yup,” Rafe said, dropping it onto a chair with an uncharacteristic lack of attention. “England last week. Well, then!” He looked around brightly in the manner of someone who, having discharged some weighty task, is ready to start afresh.

  Heavens, he was behaving oddly. I waited for him to say something enlightening, or to say anything at all, for that matter, which he failed to do, so I sat him down and poured him a drink and waited some more.

  “Incredibly strange out there,” was his eventual contribution. “Dark and crowded.”

  “England,” I said, mystified. “England has become dark and crowded.”

  “Yes?” Rafe said. “Oh, actually, I’d been thinking of Sixty-seventh Street.”

  Hmm. Obviously I would have to give Rafe quite a bit of encouragement if I wanted to hear about the girlfriend whom, by now, I was absolutely certain he’d acquired. And I did want to. I always enjoyed hearing about, and meeting, his woman of the moment. Rafe, like a hawk, swooped down upon the shiniest thing in sight, and his girls were always exotics of one sort or another, if only, as they often were, exotics ordinaire; but whatever their background, race, or interests, they were all amusing, marvelous looking, unpredictable, and none of them seemed ever to require sleep.

  Unfortunately, these flashing lights of Rafe’s life tended to burn out rather quickly, no matter how in thrall Rafe was initially. And this was the inevitable consequence, I believed, of the discrepancy between his age and theirs. It was not that I necessarily felt that Rafe should be seeing people of our own age (we were both thirty-three, as it happened). In fact, it would have seemed inappropriate. Rafe, at any age, would simply not be suited for the sobriety of adulthood. Still, the years do pass, and there were Rafe’s girls, trailing along a decade or so behind him. They could hardly be blamed if they hadn’t accrued enough substance (of the sort that only time can provide) to allow Rafe to stretch out his dealings with them beyond a month or two.

  “So. I give up, Rafael,” I said. “Tell me. Who is the lucky girl you’re in love with tonight?”

  “Tonight!” he said, and damned if he didn’t look wounded.

  Now, Rafe was my friend. It was Rafe who had accompanied me to parties and openings and weekends when John, my husband, was too busy (as he usually was) or not interested enough (and he rarely was), and it was Rafe who pulled me out of any mental mud wallow I might strand myself in, and it was Rafe I was counting on to amuse me now, while John and I parceled out our holdings and made our adieus and slogged through whatever contractual and emotional dreariness was necessitated by going on with life; and if Rafe was going to mature, this was certainly a very poor moment for him to have chosen to do it.

  “As it happens,” Rafe confessed unnecessarily, “I have started seeing someone.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “She’s simply wonderful,” he said with the fatuous solemnity of a man on the witness stand.

  “Good!” I said. I did hope she was wonderful, even though I deplored the dent she seemed to have put in Rafe’s sense of humor. “What does she do?”

  “Well…” Rafe deliberated. “She’s an actress.”

  “Poor thing,” I said after some moments had elapsed during which Rafe executed several groupings of resolute nods. “It’s such a difficult way to make a living.”

  Another nod-group. “It is. Yes it is. That’s an Ansel Adams, isn’t it? Is it new?”

  “Darling. I’ve just moved it from the dining room.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Rafe stared at it blankly. “Well, it’s sensational in here, isn’t it?”

  “So, tell me,” I said. “Is your friend in some sort of company or repertory situation? Or does she trot about in the summers being Juliet and My Sister Eileen and so on? Or must she spend every minute subjecting herself to scrutiny and rejection?”

  “Well, she’s done quite a bit of all of those things, yes. Not at the moment, but that’s certainly the idea. Yes.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “She doesn’t have to work in a restaurant, does she? How awful!”

  “Oh, not at all,” Rafe said. “No. She’s doing very well.” He scanned the walls for material.

  “I’m glad you like the Ansel Adams, Rafe,” I said.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “she has a job on a soap opera.”

  “Well!” I said. “Isn’t that splendid! And it will certainly tide her over until she finds something she wants.” Oh, why did Rafe always do this? Girl after girl. He was like some noble hound who daily fetched home the New York Post instead of the Times.

  “What’s the matter with that?” Rafe said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “With what?”

  “She’s just exactly as much an actress as—oh, God, I don’t know—Lady Macbeth would be, in one of those new-wave festivals you’re so fond of.”

  “Just exactly,” I said.

  “It’s honest work,” he said.

  “Heavens, Rafe,” I said. “Did I say it wasn’t?” These propositions of his were hardly sturdy enough to rebut.

  “I’m quite impressed, really,” Rafe said. My goodness, Rafe was bristly! Apparently he was quite embarrassed by this girl. “She’s very young, for one thing, and she took herself straight to New York from absolutely nowhere, and immediately she got herself a job in a demanding, lucrative, competitive field.”

  Field! “Well, you won’t get me to say I think it isn’t impressive,” I said, making it clear that this was to be the end of th
e discussion. “Can I give you another drink?”

  “Please,” he said. The sound of pouring gave us something sensible to listen to for a moment.

  “So, then,” I said. “What’s the name of this show she’s on?”

  “Well,” Rafe said, “it’s called, as I remember, something on the order of, er, ‘This Brief Candle.’” He focused furiously over my ear.

  Well, stuffiness is often an early adjunct of infatuation, and I was perfectly willing to let Rafe have his say. If he wanted to tell me that this girl should be knighted—or canonized or bronzed—for getting herself a job on a soap opera, that was fine. What was so irritating was that every time Rafe thought I might open my mouth, he leapt to the attack, and by the time we got into a taxi, I would have been happier getting into a bullring with a bunch of picadors.

  Fortunately, the restaurant Rafe had chosen turned out to be wonderfully soothing. It was luxurious and private, and at the sight of the cloakroom, with its rows of expensive, empty coats that called up a world in which generous, broad-shouldered men, and women in marvelous dresses (much like the one I myself happened to be wearing) inclined toward each other on banquettes, I was pierced by a feeling so keen and unalloyed it might have been called—I don’t know what it might have been called. It felt like—well, grief…actually.

  During dinner, Rafe and I stayed on neutral territory—a piece of recent legislation, Marty Harnishveiger’s renovations, an exceptionally pointless East Side murder, and my husband and marriage.

  “One really oughtn’t be able to describe one’s marriage as neutral territory, do you think?” I asked Rafe.

  “Considering the minefields that most of our friends’ marriages are,” he said, “neutral territory might be the preferable alternative.”