The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “Really?” I said. “That’s odd. I can’t really say I’m mad for it.”

  Heather wasn’t listening, though. She and Rafe had become absorbed by the engineering problems of feeding each other tacos. Well, that was certainly something they weren’t going to get any help with from me. Besides, there was no point in trying to have a rational conversation with Rafe when he was in one of his playmate-of-the-month moods. I wandered off and eventually found myself talking to Jules Racklin, whom I’d met here and there but never really talked to and who turned out to be a very interesting man. Very intelligent. Very interesting.

  The day after that party, I happened to turn on the TV at eleven o’clock, and having so recently seen Heather, I do have to say that I was pretty mesmerized by Lydia. The plot of the show didn’t seem to have progressed to any great degree since the episode I had seen previously, and at the appearance of each familiar figure, I felt a slight sensation of agreeable reinforcement, of knowing my way around.

  I had tuned in while Eric was speaking on the phone. And while I had never actually seen Eric before, I was able to identify him by inference from the conversation I had heard between—um, let’s see—Brent and…yes, Hank. As he talked, Eric moved a painting on the wall, exposing a safe at which he looked gloatingly for a moment. Then he replaced the painting, hung up the phone, and left his house, never noticing—the foolish fellow—that Brent and Hank were sitting in a car parked right across the street. Carolyn and Chad then drank cocktails and had an agonizing discussion (which I suspected was one of many) about whether they did or did not want to start a family. Carolyn appeared to acquiesce to Chad’s insistence that it would be better to wait, but I saw right through her. She felt hurt, I could tell, and disappointed. Then Colleen appeared to be developing, in a supermarket, a rather modern crush on Ellie’s mother, who herself, to judge from what followed, was somewhat more interested in Mr. Armstrong. Suddenly there was a woman from another universe holding a box of soap called Vision. What had happened? Ah, one episode of “This Brief Candle” had been concluded, of course. I turned off the set (I had a thousand things to do), and the little light in the center danced furiously, brighter and brighter, into oblivion.

  Now. Right. The first thing was to call and thank Cookie. Cookie and I had the requisite little jaw about what a delightful evening, etc. (actually, it had turned out rather nicely, due to that nice Jules Racklin), and when I’d heaped upon Cookie what I hoped were sufficient thanks, I felt I might as well hit her up for a couple of grand for the foundation. Not that it would do any good, but you never knew. She might have some good ideas for sources, anyhow. Cookie always had on hand the scrap of information one needed, if one could bear to pick through the refuse to get it.

  “Heavens, dear,” she said, when I suggested a donation. “I’d be thrilled to, as you know or you wouldn’t have asked, but I just don’t have that sort of money lying around at the moment.” My God. Poor Cookie had probably spent her last pesos on taco chips for the party. “Why don’t you call Nina Morisette? That dame is absolutely loaded, I’m telling you, darling. To her, that kind of money is like two cents. And I mean two cents.”

  “Nina’s such a tightwad, though,” I said. “When you talk to her you’d think she was starving.”

  “Oh, I know, dear,” Cookie said. “She is a witch, isn’t she? But her familiar—what’s his name? Garvin Something, Something Garvin—is the one to talk to. He’s a complete fool, I promise you, and he can get her to give to any ridiculous thing.”

  “By the way,” I said, feeling that the time had come to change the subject, “wasn’t it nice to meet Rafe’s girlfriend?”

  “Wasn’t it,” Cookie agreed. “Such a sweet child. They all are, though, aren’t they? I do wonder how he can tell all those sweet children apart. Ah, me. Then again, I suppose one might as well ask how anyone can tell us sour wrecks apart!”

  “Ahaha,” I agreed politely while Cookie ratified her little witticism with raucous baying.

  “I talked to her for some time,” Cookie continued when she’d recovered, “and she really did seem sweet, you know. It’s amazing how evil she is on that TV show of hers.”

  “Yes, what is that girl up to?” I asked. “Lydia—isn’t that her name?”

  “Oh, well!” Cookie said. “It’s quite exciting, really, because the girl who used to play Lydia got fired, so right before she left, the writers or producers or whoever had her seduce her sister Carolyn’s fiancée, Jad, and then go off somewhere to make unseen trouble for a while, while the audience could forget what she looked like. In the meantime, Carolyn and Jad got married, and then Lydia (who’s Heather now, of course) came back and started vamping Jad again like crazy. And that’s just what she’s doing for fun! She’s also gotten herself involved with a fellow named Brent, just to spite Brent’s girlfriend, Colleen, who really is a bit lame, when you get right down to it, and as a favor to Brent (at least that’s what Brent thinks—it’s really so she’ll have power over him) Lydia’s seducing this man Eric to get some blueprints from him that Brent can use to blackmail Mr. Armstrong!”

  “Oh, no!” I said. “Is that who Eric was talking to on the phone just now? Lydia?” A silence descended on the other end of the phone like a gavel.

  “I can’t imagine,” Cookie said.

  “But weren’t you watching?” I asked foolishly.

  “Dear, that show is just something I stumble upon once a century or so,” Cookie said, gingerly depositing my question in the toilet.

  Damn. Cookie was actually embarrassed. And I would have to pay, for sure. “Well, anyway, dear,” she said, “I’m glad you enjoyed yourself last night. I thought you must be enjoying yourself when I saw you there with Jules. He really is a scorcher, isn’t he? Best-looking man I ever saw.”

  “Very pleasant,” I said thinly. “Anyway, Cookie dear…”

  “Oh, he’s a dish, all right. I just knew how much you’d enjoy him. When he walked in alone, I got down on my knees and I thanked God that Pia Dougherty hadn’t been able to make it. Naturally, I’d had to invite her, too, but, fortunately, it seems she’s out getting photographed with some goats in Kashmir for somebody’s spring collection. Oh, I don’t know—I really just don’t. Everyone talks about how gorgeous she is, but I really don’t see it, do you? I mean, it’s really him, isn’t it? He’s the really stunning one.”

  “Oh, the time!” I said. “Just look! I must hang up and run.” I hung up and sat. Pia Dougherty, huh. Maybe Buddy would give me a good write-off if I donated my phone to the museum.

  I must admit I wasn’t having just the greatest time with men. I was finding that you have to get to know someone a bit in order to become interested in getting to know him at all, and that was such a bore! The same questions, the same little conversations, over and over: Were you close to your father? Just think—so, you, too, as a child, were afraid of getting hit by the baseball! Tell me, do you really believe that it’s possible to rid oneself of unconscious concerns over fuel costs when discussing our Middle Eastern policies? And so on and so forth—just like having to slog through those statistics courses in college before being allowed to register for Abnormal Personality. I did go out now and again, of course, but in a perfunctory, frog-kissing sort of spirit, and a frog, in my experience, is a frog to the finish.

  My own love life, at that time, then, provided me with no information to sort through—nothing to think about or try to get in order. It was as useful to the production of conversation as disappearing ink is to the production of literature, and so I began to tap, for all it was worth, that skill which one develops during adolescence, of turning to account the love lives of one’s friends. And since among my friends Rafe had always tended to have the most multiform and highly colored love life, I looked forward most to seeing him.

  Sadly, though, he had become quite uncooperative since he’d taken up with Heather. He rarely put in an appearance, and when he did, he just sat around lumpishly and quaffed down
great quantities of my expensive Scotch.

  “How are you these days, Rafe?” I would say.

  “Fine,” he would say, with a remote, childish formality. “Just fine.”

  “Yes? How’s everything going?” I would say.

  “Oh, fine, thanks. Very well.”

  “Good…And how’s Heather?”

  “Oh, she’s quite well. Just fine. Say, you don’t have any more of that Scotch, do you? It’s awfully good.”

  One evening he came over in a state of overt grumpiness. It seemed that he and Heather had had tickets to something, but Heather had been required on the spur of the moment to learn a huge new set of lines. “One of the guys in the show was in an accident today,” Rafe said, “so they have to do something about it.”

  “What can they do?” I said. “Either he was in an accident or he wasn’t, I’d think.”

  “What I mean,” Rafe said, “is that they’ll have to write him out of the story for a week or so. And then they’ll have to think of some reason why he’s in a cast from head to toe. It’s going to be pretty conspicuous, after all.”

  “Oh.—Yes.—I see. How awful. And rather eerie, for that matter. Will they think up some accident for him to have had in the script, do you suppose?”

  “I don’t know,” Rafe said. “It seems logical.”

  “You know,” I said, “a few weeks ago I happened to see the show, and this man whose name is Mr. Armstrong had this terrible cold. And somebody else said he’d gotten it from kissing his secretary, Tracy. And, you know, maybe the week before the actress that plays Tracy really had had a cold, come to think of it. But in any case the writers couldn’t have manufactured that guy’s runny nose.”

  “Yup. Part of the credit for that cold just has to go to the ultimate scriptwriter, doesn’t it?” Rafe yawned, bored by his own cliché. “Hey, speaking of the determining hand, you’re just about winding up this year’s work, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. The panel was reviewing each other’s recommendations all that month. “We don’t start up again for a while. But to tell you the truth,” I confessed, “I’ve been thinking about getting into publishing instead of going on with the foundation.”

  “Oh,” Rafe said.

  “‘Oh’? Is that all? I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Why?” Rafe said. “That is, I have no objection, but why did you think I’d be pleased, particularly?”

  “I thought you disapproved of what I do.”

  “I don’t,” Rafe said. “I don’t think I disapprove of it.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “In any case, I feel I’ve done my turn for society. I feel that now it’s time for me to become involved in something for myself. I want to get somewhere—to use my abilities to…to…build, in some way. Don’t you think that’s important?”

  “Well,” Rafe said. “It seems to me that what’s important is how you feel about your work while you’re doing it.”

  “What?” I said. “I feel fine about my work while I’m doing it, whatever that means. And while I’m not doing it.”

  “That’s good,” Rafe said, without conviction.

  “I feel just fine about my work,” I said. “I really don’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “I’m not sure myself,” he said. “But there’s something about the way Heather…I mean, I’ve noticed, watching Heather, that, well, what she does doesn’t make her feel important.”

  “I should think not,” I said.

  “No, but I mean, it doesn’t make her feel unimportant either. I mean, I’ve noticed, watching Heather, that because she distinguishes between herself and her work, in some way, that—”

  “Really?” I said. I really couldn’t take one more instant of this. “Do tell me. How interesting. Let’s see. You’ve noticed, you’ve noticed—that it’s better to be on a soap opera than to subsidize art. No—you’ve noticed that it doesn’t matter whether you’re Eva Braun or Florence Nightingale as long as you feel good about it.”

  “You will be astonished to learn,” Rafe said, “that that is not what I mean. I don’t really mean that you’re important, at all, in your work. I mean that it’s the work itself that—oh, obviously, of course…I don’t know. I’ve just been watching how, if it’s really your work that’s important to you, rather than some idea of yourself doing the work—that is, if your approach to your work is one of genuine interest in the work rather than yourself—then it will necessarily follow that the work will itself respond somehow, with a genuine—”

  “Genuine!” I said. “Genuine! That’s a pretty loaded word you’re tossing around there! Look, Rafael, everything is genuine, if you’re going to start giving me this kind of stuff! I’ve already told you that my work is important to me. I don’t know why you insist on thinking it isn’t. See, that’s genuine Glenlivet you’re drinking out of genuine Baccarat. You’re sitting in a genuine Eames genuine chair. I don’t know what you’re talking about! Do you think I should go out and get myself killed in some war to prove I’m serious? Do you think I should get a job on a soap opera? What do you think? The Spanish Civil War is over! The entire Abraham Lincoln Brigade is dead! I really don’t know what we’re talking about! That’s a genuine TV set over there on which a genuine simulacrum of a genuine version of your girlfriend is genuinely conjured up—and furthermore, my genuine body has the same damn genuine molecular structure as her body’s damn genuine molecular structure!”

  Heavens! What had gotten into me? What had the Abraham Lincoln Brigade or Heather’s molecular structure to do with publishing? It was just that Rafe’s murky attitudinizing really had gotten to me. It really had. He had really changed since he’d started seeing that girl.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m very sorry to say these things to you, but, really, Rafe, you used to be so charming.”

  “It seems so long ago, now, doesn’t it?” he said sadly, swirling the ice cubes around in his drink.

  It was a long, long time before I saw Rafe again. Several months, probably, elapsed before, one afternoon, he called.

  “Can I take you to dinner?” he said.

  “What, tonight?”

  “Well, are you free?”

  I was delighted he had called, actually. I was sorry I’d jumped on him that evening when he’d obviously just been confused and troubled; and when we met, at a very pretty Italian restaurant in my neighborhood, neither of us mentioned how long it had been since we’d seen each other.

  Rafe ordered a bottle of Cliquot. “To the free peoples of the world,” he said, lifting his glass.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Is Heather giving you a hard time?”

  “Oh, we just haven’t seen too much of each other for a while.”

  “You finally got tired of each other, huh?” I said.

  “No. We just don’t like each other. Jesus, that’s not true.” He raked his hands through his hair, which, in view of the horror he had of disarranging it, indicated profound anguish.

  “Poor Rafe,” I said, but with measured commiseration. I was waiting to hear more before deciding whether it was sympathy that was required or (had I been that sort of person) an “I told you so.”

  “She wanted to get married, you see. Have children.” My God, what a thought. Rafe surrounded by weensy Rafe replicas. “In fact, she gave me something like an ultimatum. Oh, God. I’m too old to settle down. I’ve really got to start running around again.”

  “It does seem to suit you, Rafe.”

  “I just couldn’t. She’s a wonderful girl, but I couldn’t. Particularly the children part, you know? I do want children of course, eventually, but just not right now. And just the fact that she says to me, ‘Look, I really want children, I want them now, I think that if we’re to continue we should get married,’ and I don’t have any response at all, except sheer terror—well, that indicates to me that it’s wrong, you know? No matter how I think I feel about her, that proves that it’s just wrong.” How glossy
his hair looked in the candlelight while he shoved it around like that! “Don’t you think that’s true?” he said.

  “Well,” I said slowly—I felt I was looking at us both from a great height—“I suppose it must be.”

  “See, that’s what I mean,” he said. “Here, have some of my zucchini. How do you feel about children, anyway? I’ve always wondered whether you were disappointed about not having any.”

  “I might still have some one of these days. I’m only your age, remember?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Of course. But how do you feel about them now?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, really,” I said. “They are dear, but to tell you the truth, Rafe, I sometimes find them—I don’t know—off-putting. I mean, those tiny faces all lit up with some entirely groundless joy, and then something happens and they just crumple all up like old Christmas wrappings. All that anguish, all that drama! I mean, it’s quite cute and whatnot, but who can understand it? Of course, they’re so sweet—absolutely adorable—and yet I can’t help feeling that they’re, well…oddities. Almost a bit creepy, somehow.”

  “I know,” Rafe said, sounding faintly surprised. “That’s sort of how I feel, really.”

  I looked across at him, sitting there lost in his fleecy sadness, and I wondered if Heather knew what she’d given away. Perhaps she really was looking for something more ordinary than life with Rafe, or perhaps, having been dazzled by him, as doubtless she had been, she feared that there was nothing to rely on beneath his sophistication and glamour. But that was the thing about Rafe, I knew. Underneath the alpaca and wool, underneath the—well, no matter—fundamentally, I mean, he was as good a man as you could ever hope to find.

  “She really is a marvelous girl,” Rafe said, as if in verification of his own opinion (although by then, of course, it didn’t really matter if his opinion was correct or not). “She has a quality I’ve never really encountered in anyone else. A sort of directness, or clarity, that gives her courage. Like some magic sword.”