The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  She lowered her voice even further. “Cafetales!” she said, and launched into a confidential torrent of chatter.

  “What’s she talking about?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But what’s she saying?” Sarah said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Her Spanish is peculiar. All I can tell is she’s saying something about someone being somewhere. In the coffee plantations she goes through to get here. I don’t know.”

  Just then María took it into her head to ask if Sarah and I had any children. “¿Qué?” I said. “No.”

  “No, what?” Sarah said.

  “No, nothing. No, you and I don’t have any children.”

  Sarah laughed. “Relax, Dennis,” she said. “Ask her how many children she has.”

  But María seemed to have anticipated the question. “Tell the señora,” she was already saying, solemnly and proudly, “I have seven children. Four of them are living and three of them are dead.”

  Rest of morning very nice. Sarah hauled me right back into the bed María had just made. Then the market for about an hour with the McGees, after which they dropped us off for lunch at La Mariposa, introduced us to owner. Place very agreeable, will be able to write up nicely. (Daily except Sun., 12 p.m.–10 p.m.) Gardens, fountain. Very popular with Americans, like ladies at table nearby wearing outfits made from native textiles. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful,” they kept saying to one another.

  Perhaps can find tactful way to suggest house wine less than ideal. Also meat. (Sarah’s baked chicken might have been nice, but somewhat raw, alas.)

  Sarah began very funny imitation of the beauty-loving ladies at the table near us. Had to shush her—probably friends of the McGees. Owner cruised by to talk with us for a few minutes. Said how hard things are for restaurants now, prices increasing geometrically, value of currency plummeting, everything grown for export. Told us that price of black beans (“the traditional food of our poor”) has almost doubled in recent months. Sarah: “So, what are your poor eating now?”

  Couldn’t help smiling. Owner smiled, too—with hatred. “I really wouldn’t know,” he said.

  Actually, town might be most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen myself. Gets more beautiful as eye adjusts. So high, so pale, so strange. Flowers astonishing—graceful rococo shapes, sinuous, pendant, like ornamentations on the churches. Every hour of the day, in every changing tint of air, new details coming forward. The ancient stillness. All the different ancientnesses—Spain, Rome, themselves so new compared to the Indians. All converging right here in the square. Concentrated in the processions, in every dark eye.

  Sarah, for all her snootiness to Dot about shopping, can’t resist stopping at every corner and every market. Our room now draped with astounding textiles, bits of Indian clothing—crammed with flowers and little orchid trees. (María shakes her head, amused, all indulgence with Sarah.)

  Early this evening processions of costumed children all over the place. Sarah enthralled. Flower-petal pictures appearing everywhere—alfombras (carpets) McGee tells me they’re called. Put down only to be trampled within hours by the processions—celebration of the suffering of Christ.

  Saw a man lifting a mesh sack of mangoes about twice his size. Bent way backward over it, slipped its strap around his forehead, then drew himself forward so that the mangoes rested on his back, as though he were a cart. Sarah stopped in her tracks and stared.

  I put a comforting arm around her, tried to move her along. Think it must be particularly humiliating to be stared at if you’re doing uncongenial work. “It certainly does look awful to us,” I said. “But it must be different for people who do it every day.”

  “Sure,” Sarah said. “The difference is that they do it every day.”

  I held Sarah away from me and looked at her. “Sarah?” I said. “Are you angry at me?”

  “No,” she said tentatively.

  The group of ladies from the table near us at lunch walked by and waved as though we were all old friends. One called over to us: “How are you enjoying it? Gorgeous, aren’t they, the processions?” Shaded her eyes, flashed a toothy smile. “Thought-provoking!”

  Sarah waved absently, then frowned and nestled against me. I stroked her hair, and the perfume of incense and flowers rose up around us. “Dennis,” she said meditatively, “don’t you like me?”

  “Don’t I like you?” I said. I held her away from me and studied her, but she was serious. “What do you mean? I adore you.”

  I smiled and gave her a squeeze, but it was a few moments before she spoke. “So then, listen, Dennis. Why did you have to trot out my—my credentials for the McGees?”

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” I said, amazed. Explained that I’d only been trying to provide her with an excuse not to see them. “Besides,” I said. “Why shouldn’t I be proud of you?”

  She drew away from me. “Dennis, who are these people to demand respectability from me? I don’t like these people. These people are idiots.”

  Felt oddly stricken. Can’t really blame Sarah—that’s how she feels. But, still, McGees are clearly doing their best to be hospitable, pleasant. “Of course, the McGees might not be our favorite people,” I said. “But why should they be?” Tucked an unruly label back inside Sarah’s T-shirt. “And, after all, they’re perfectly harmless.”

  Sarah stared sadly into the lively crowds.

  “Besides,” I said. “They’re getting on.” I stooped over, quavered. “I’ll be like that soon myself, I suppose.”

  Sarah frowned again, then laughed. “Oh, Dennis,” she said, but her hand crept over and curled into mine, like a pliant little animal.

  Buen Pastor. Lunch, dinner, Tues.–Sun. Of the many beautiful restaurants in town, perhaps the loveliest is Buen Pastor. Enjoy a cocktail of platonic perfection outside in the moonlit garden. Or, if the evening is cool, in the bar, where a fire may be roaring at the massive colonial hearth. There are likely also to be fires in each of the several beautifully proportioned dining rooms. It has to be said that the menu, though worthy, is not particularly inspired, but each of its few items is carefully prepared (the steak au poivre is sure to please) and the wine list is adequate. The staff is happy to assist you in your selections (all speak English here), and despite the luxury of the surroundings, a memorable evening with cocktails, wine, and a full meal for two will put hardly a dent in your wallet. The atmosphere is relaxed, intimate, and romantic.

  Wednesday

  “Relaxed, intimate, and romantic!” was the first thing I heard this morning—Woke up to see Sarah reading the notes about Buen Pastor I’d started to slam together last night when we got in from dinner, which I’d imprudently left right in the typewriter. (No more of that, you can be sure! From now on, everything gets put away immediately. Locked up.) Sarah laughed incredulously. “You call that place relaxed, intimate, and romantic?”

  “For God’s sake,” I said. “That’s just a draft! I hadn’t even finished.”

  “Well, when you get around to ‘revising your draft,’” Sarah said, “you might mention that the first thing you see when you get to the door is some kind of butler with a machine gun.”

  “Submachine gun,” I said. “Machine guns are larger.”

  “Oh, well, then,” Sarah said.

  “Besides,” I said. I rubbed my eyes. “I can’t just put that into my piece, can I, Sarah?”

  “Why can’t you?” she said. She sat down next to me on the bed. “Dennis.”

  “Because,” I said. “Sarah, please. I’m supposed to be writing about people’s vacations.”

  Sarah stuffed a corner of the pillow into her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Couldn’t suppress a sigh. “I wasn’t aware, last night, that the guard upset you.”

  “Naturally he upset me,” Sarah said. “I assumed he upset you, too.”

  “Of course he did,” I said. “Naturally he upset me.” (Naturally I was upset when I we
nt to give my name to the maître d’ and saw that thing pointing at me. But it isn’t as though restaurants at home don’t have their own security systems.) “Sarah—” I took her hand. “What’s happened? Has something happened? Have you been having an awful time here?”

  Gloomy, theatrical pause. “The truth is, Dennis,” she said, “I’ve been having a terrific time.”

  That sound ominously familiar; that muted, baffled, fragile tone designed to censure. Can’t understand it—some sort of curse hovering over me that makes women sad? The women who are attracted to me are active, capable women. Women with interesting and demanding careers. Women, sometimes, with reasonably happy marriages, families. (Which, granted, can have its drawbacks, but one expects it, at least, to ensure a certain degree of stability.) Yet how rapidly these self-sufficient women become capricious and sulky. Absolutely unglued. Even the perky, adventurous wives who come my way (unsolicited, unsolicited!) simply transform themselves. And these women, who, I think it’s fair to say, engage me for nothing more than, to use Sarah’s (rather crude) word, fun—these same women—invariably begin to accuse me, in the most amorphous terms, of some unsubstantiated crime. It’s a strange thing. It is. All these women, showing up on my doorstep, demanding my attention and affection. And then, when I’ve given them every bit of attention and affection I’ve got, insisting that I’ve failed them in some way. “Self-absorption,” one of them said. “Shallowness of feeling,” said another. As though I were some kind of broken vending machine!

  Margaret S.? Who actually claimed I was “rejecting” at the very moment she was leaving me? Even Cynthia—my own wife—so happy when I married her, so confident; the way she became self-pitying and tremulous in front of my very eyes! Implored her to tell me what was the matter. Huge error. The matter was me, naturally; I was not really interested in her. Not interested! And the way, when I pointed out the irrefutable demonstrations of my interest, she would become incoherent: “Not that, not that! You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “Sarah,” I said, “when we were in San Francisco you told me you loved traveling. That’s what you said. You said you loved traveling.”

  “When we were in San Francisco,” Sarah said, “and I told you I loved traveling, we were in San Francisco.”

  “Well, but travel is travel,” I said. “One sees new things.”

  “‘New things!’” Sarah said. “Guys in uniforms with automatics?”

  “Now, that’s not fair,” I said gently. Waited for a moment so she would hear the whining tone of her own voice, see the roomful of her happy purchases, see out the wooden-shuttered window, where a jaunty little halo of cloud sat over the peak of a volcano, and women padded silently by with their black-eyed babies bundled on their backs.

  “I’m sorry, Dennis,” she said. Clambered over into my lap. Twined herself around me. “I just feel so strange. I don’t know what’s going on. The thing is, I really am having a terrific time.”

  Faint sounds of a brass band and the fragrance of incense were beginning to filter into our room with the buttery sunlight. Persecuting loveliness. Rubbed the tender edge of Sarah’s ear. Pointed out that the restaurant was something like an airport, if you thought about it: protection irrelevant to most of the travelers.

  “Well, I know,” Sarah said. “But who’s all the protection from, here? I mean, look, Dennis, who is the enemy?”

  Snuggled her against me. Reminded her that we’ve all read about such things; pointed out that we’re overreacting, she and I, simply because we’re here.

  Made me think: How tempting it is to put oneself into the drama—“It’s awful; I’ve seen it.” Unattractive, self-aggrandizing impulse. Reminded Sarah of the morning we were having breakfast at her place and Karen stormed in, ranting about factory farming, and we kept saying, “We know, Karen, we know, it’s really awful.” Lifted Sarah’s chin and was rewarded with a reluctant smile. “But Karen couldn’t stop talking, remember? Because she had just seen it the day before. So, to her, it seemed just incredibly real?

  “The thing is,” I said, “we could go around sniffling all the time, but terrible things are going to happen whether we sniffle or not. Yes, the lives some people lead are horrifying, but if you accept the idea that it’s better for some people to be fortunate than for no people to be fortunate, then it’s preposterous to make yourself miserable just because you happen to be one of those fortunate people. I mean, here we are, in an amazingly beautiful place, witnessing possibly the most lavish Easter celebration in the whole of the New World. Wouldn’t it be morally reprehensible not to enjoy it?”

  Sarah sighed. “I know,” she said. “You’re right.”

  “We could reject that out of principle,” I said. “But what would the principle be?”

  “All right, Dennis.” Sarah jumped up and fluffed her hair. “I already said I agree.”

  Came back to the room later, tempers restored by breakfast. María there, putting a jug of fresh water on the table. Said, “procession now?! Nice!!”

  “Tell me something, Dennis,” Sarah said when María left. “Do you ever think about having another child?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I mean, I think about it, of course, but I don’t think about actually doing it.”

  “Take it easy,” Sarah said. “I was just wondering.”

  “I already have one perfectly good child,” I said. “An adult, now, actually, almost. It doesn’t make sense to start all over at my age. For someone your age—well, that’s a different story. You should have children.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted children,” Sarah said crossly.

  “You have every right to want children,” I said. Looked at her closely—a bit puffy? Due for her period any minute now, I think. “You’re one of those women who can do it all, you know. Career, family—”

  “Hey,” Sarah said. “I didn’t say I wanted children. I was just asking how you feel.”

  “I know,” I said. “Goodness.” I was just saying how I feel.

  Especially hot today; was noticing it very suddenly—room darkened swoopingly. Put my head in my hands, then Sarah was speaking: “Listen, Dennis—are machine guns, like, a lot bigger than submachine guns?”

  “Some of them,” I said. The fact is, David is much more vivid to me as I imagine him now, playing basketball with his friends, strolling away from the house in Claremont on his way to a movie, spinning along in his rattly little car, than he seems when he’s sitting across from me in some padded restaurant, waiting patiently for our visit to be over. “Why?”

  “Because I think maybe that’s one out there.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. Sat up to look out the window and saw a wooden platform coming down the street. It looked amazingly like one of the andas, except that it was accompanied by a convoy of soldiers in uniform instead of townspeople in purple satin, and in place of Christ or the Virgin Mary, it displayed a mounted machine gun. “Yup, that’s what it is, all right,” I told Sarah.

  The soldiers—the hard-eyed, ravenous-looking boys—surged up beyond the window, and in their midst the lordly, searching weapon reigned. A plunging shame weakened my hands and my knees as though at any second that instrument of terrible destruction might swing around toward me, discovering the foolish incidentalness of my body, its humiliatingly provisional life. No one on the street appeared to notice the entourage. A path cleared apparently by casual occurrence; only sign of anything out of the ordinary: a barely perceptible slowing, a thickening of motion as it passed.

  Sarah and I stood at the window, watched until the entire retinue, with its platform and its sickening gleam of metal, turned the corner. Within an instant nothing left but the soft bustle of the street.

  I put my arm around Sarah, and the small intimacy conducted away my panic. Tried to reassure her: “If there were anything out of the ordinary occurring, someone would tell us.”

  “Someone did tell us,” Sarah said.

  “Who?” I said.


  “María,” she said.

  “The maid?” I said. “I mean someone who actually knows.”

  “Like who?” Sarah said.

  “Like a journalist, for example.”

  Sarah stared at me. “Dennis,” she said. “You’re a journalist.”

  “All right, Sarah,” I said. “Please.”

  Does Sarah know how cruel she is sometimes? Obviously there’s no way in the world I’d be doing something of this sort if the bank hadn’t gone the way banks tend to go these days. “But you know what I mean. Obviously I’m not saying María doesn’t know what’s happening to her. Obviously she does know what’s happening to her. All I’m saying is that she has no way of understanding it. In context, that is. If I were you, I really wouldn’t worry about María. She has quite a little flair for drama, but the truth is that her attention is on the Easter celebrations. Festivities. Frivolous matters”—I smiled and pushed a strand of hair from Sarah’s eyes—“just like ours is.”

  “Dennis,” Sarah said. “The maid is afraid to come to work. There’s a mounted machine gun rolling down the street.”

  “I am not disputing that,” I said. “Obviously. It’s only that—Sarah, tell me something frankly. Are you embarrassed by what I do?”

  “Embarrassed!” Sarah said, and actually blushed. “By what you do? Of course not, Dennis.”

  “Look, Sarah,” I said. “This travel/restaurant business is every bit as much a joke to me as it is to you. And I would certainly never dream of calling myself a journalist—”

  “Well, of course you’re a—”

  “I would never dream of calling myself a journalist at this point,” I said. “But it’s an easy target, isn’t it? It’s easy to be snobbish about this, just because it doesn’t seem ‘important’ in some superficial way. And who knows, it’s not impossible, that in a few years I could be—well, I could hardly hope for anything like the foreign desk, I suppose. But I won’t be anywhere if I’m not reasonably—and, besides, it’s only fair to Zwicker, who, quite frankly, took pity on me, no matter what you might think of his half-witted—”