The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  How arbitrary it all was, and cruel. This identity, that identity: Otto, William, Portia, Molly, the doctor…

  She’d be up now, sitting at her own kitchen table, the white enamel table with a cup of tea, thinking about something, about numbers streaming past in stately sequences, about remote astral pageants…The doctor had rested his hand kindly on her shoulder. And what she must have felt then! Oh, to convert that weight of the world’s compassion into something worthwhile—the taste, if only she could have lifted his hand and kissed it, the living satin feel of his skin…Everyone had to put things aside, to put things aside for good.

  The way they had smiled at one another, she and that doctor! What can you do, their smiles had said. The handsome doctor in his handsome-doctor suit and Sharon in her disheveled-lunatic suit; what a charade. In this life, Sharon’s little spark of consciousness would be costumed inescapably as a waif at the margins of mental organization and the doctor’s would be costumed inescapably as a flashing exemplar of supreme competence; in this life (and, frankly, there would be no other) the hospital was where they would meet.

  “Otto—”

  A hand was resting on Otto’s shoulder.

  “William,” Otto said. It was William. They were in the clean, dim kitchen. The full moon had risen high over the neighbors’ buildings, where the lights were almost all out. Had he been asleep? He blinked up at William, whose face, shadowed against the light of the night sky, was as inflected, as ample in mystery as the face in the moon. “It’s late, my darling,” Otto said. “I’m tired. What are we doing down here?”

  Like It or Not

  Kate would have a little tour of the coast, Giovanna would have the satisfaction of having provided an excursion for her American house guest without having to interrupt her own work, and the man whom everyone called Harry would have the pleasure, as Giovanna put it, of Kate’s company: demonstrably a good thing for all concerned.

  “I wish this weren’t happening,” Kate said. “I’ll be inconveniencing him. And besides—”

  “No.” Giovanna waved a finger. “This is the point. He goes every few months to check on this place of his. He loves to show people about, he loves to poke around the little shops. So, why not? You’ll go with him as far as one of the towns, you’ll give him a chance to shop, you’ll give him a chance to shine, you’ll spend the night at some pleasant hotel, then he’ll go on and you’ll find your way back here by taxi and train.”

  So, yes—it was hard to say just who was doing whom a favor…

  “The coast is very beautiful,” Giovanna added. “You don’t feel like enjoying such things right now, I know, but right now is when your chance presents itself.”

  The whole thing had twisted itself into shape several days earlier at a party—a noisy roomful of Giovanna’s friends. Harry had been speaking to Kate in English, but his unplaceable accent and the wedges of other languages flashing around Kate chopped up her concentration. She tried to follow his voice—he was obliged to go frequently to the coast…

  Had she left enough in the freezer? Brice and Blair were hardly children, but whenever they came back home they reverted to sheer incompetence. Besides, they’d be so busy dealing with their father…

  And was Kate fond of it? the person, Harry, was asking.

  “Fond of…” She searched his face. “Oh. Well, actually I’ve never…” and then both she and he were silenced, rounding this corner of the conversation and seeing its direction.

  Giovanna had simply stood there, smiling a bright, vague smile, as though she couldn’t hear a thing. And Harry had been polite—technically, at least; Kate gave him every opportunity to weasel out of an invitation to her, but he’d shouldered the burden manfully. And so there it was, the thing that was going to happen, like it or not. Still, Giovanna was right. And perhaps the very fact that Kate was in no mood to do anything proved, in fact, that she should submit gracefully to whatever…opportunity came her way.

  Over and over, now that she was visiting Giovanna, she’d recall—the phone ringing, herself answering…as if, listening hard enough this time, she might hear something different. Sitting on the sofa, shoes off…It was December 3, the date was on the quizzes she was grading. She’d almost knocked over her cup of tea, answering the phone with her hands full of papers. “Has Baker talked to you about what’s going on with him?” Norman had asked.

  It was the gentleness of Norman’s voice that stayed with her, the tea swaying in her cup. What practical difference did Baker’s illness make to her life? Almost none. It was a good fifteen years since she and Baker had gotten divorced.

  She’d sent out her annual Christmas letter:

  Sorry to be late this year, everyone, (as usual!) but school seems to get more and more time-consuming. Always more administrative annoyances, more student crises…This year we had to learn a new drill, in addition to the fire drill and the cyclone drill—a drive-by shooting drill! You can tell how old all the teachers here are by what we do when that bell goes off. Anyone else remember the atomic-bomb drill? Whenever the alarm rings I still just dive under the desk. Blair is surviving her first year of law school. Brice swears he’ll never…

  and so on. She looked at what she’d written—apparently a description of her life.

  To Giovanna’s copy she appended a note: “I’m fine, really, but Baker’s sick. Very. And Blair and Brice are here this week spending days with him and Norman, nights with me. Blair’s fiancé calls every few hours, frantically apologizing. He pleads, she storms. Grand opera! Will she just please tell him why she’s angry? She’s not angry, she insists—it’s just all this apologizing…I guess the diva-gene skipped a generation. Speaking of which, Mother asks after you. She still talks about how that boring friend of Baker’s followed you back to Europe after the wedding. She’s weirdly sweet sometimes these days. Think that means she’s dying? It scares me out of my wits, actually…”

  Giovanna faxed Kate at school: Come stay over spring break. No excuses.

  It had been so many years since they’d seen each other, letters were so rarely exchanged, that Giovanna had come to seem abstract; Kate hadn’t even been aware of confiding. She stared at the fax as she went into her classroom. The map was still rolled down over the blackboard from the previous class. In fact, Giovanna was not only capable, evidently, of reading the note, she was also less than fifteen inches away.

  They had met almost thirty years earlier at a college to which Kate had been sent for its patrician reputation and its august location, and to which Giovanna had been exiled for its puritanical reputation and backwater location, far removed from her own country and her customary amusements. Kate had first encountered the famous Giovanna in the hall outside her room, passed out on the floor, had dragged her inside, revived her, and from then on had joyfully assisted her in and out windows on extralegal forays, after hours, to destinations unequivocally off-limits, with scandalously older men—the more distinguished of the professors, local politicians, visiting lecturers and entertainers…

  The two girls found one another’s characteristics, both national and personal, hilarious and illuminating. They scrutinized each other—the one stolid, socially awkward, midwestern, and oblique; the other polished, European, and satirical—as if each were looking into a transforming mirror, which reflected now certain qualities, now certain others. So many possibilities had floated in that mirror!

  While Giovanna worked long hours at her firm, Kate walked dutifully through the city, staring at churches, paintings, and fountains. What had she seen? She couldn’t have said. She drew the line absolutely, she’d told Blair, at taking photographs. “But, Mother,” Blair had said. “You’d get so much more out of your trip!” Poor Brice—how would he be faring at home with his sister? All his life Blair had been trying to turn him upside down and shake him, as if she could dislodge hidden problems from his pockets like loose change.

  At night, Kate and Giovanna ate in local trattorias, then sat in Giovanna’s
huge apartment, sipping wine and talking lazily. How pleasant it must be to live like Giovanna, surrounded by beauty, by beautiful objects, so many of which had been in her family for generations. The years slid through their conversation, looping around, forming a fragile, shifting lace. “Is it possible?” Giovanna said. “We’re older than your mother was when we met.”

  “Too strange,” Kate said. “Too scary.” When she dropped by every week or so now to check on her mother, Kate would often find her asleep in a chair, her head dropping sideways, her mouth slightly open. “Most of the time she’s still fairly true to form, thank heavens. She’s attached the one available old gent around and she’s running him ragged. He simply beams. All the sweet local widows are still standing at his door, clutching their pies and pot roasts. They don’t know what hit them. You know, all those years, when Baker and I were having so much trouble and neither of us quite understood what was happening and the kids were frantic and the house was pandemonium all the time—just as we’d all start screaming at each other, the phone would ring and there she’d be, saying, ‘So, how is everyone enjoying this beautiful Sunday afternoon?’ Now the phone rings and she says, ‘Kate! What are you doing at home on a Saturday night?’”

  “Ah, well.” Giovanna lit a cigarette, kindling its forbidden fragrance. “She’s having an adventure. And what about you?”

  “Me!” Kate said. “Me?”

  “What about that guy you wrote me about a year or two ago—Rover, Rower…”

  “Rowan. Oh, lord. Blair was very enthusiastic about that one. One day she said to me, ‘Mother, where’s this going, this thing with Rowan?’ I said, ‘Going? I’m almost fifty!’”

  Giovanna exhaled a curtain of smoke. From behind it, her steady gaze rested on Kate. “You broke it off?”

  “Give me a drag, please. Of course not. Though to tell you the truth, I just don’t feel the need to put myself through all that again. I really don’t. Anyhow, the day came, naturally, when he said he wasn’t, guess what, ready for commitment—he actually used the word—so soon after his divorce. And then naturally the next day came, when I heard he’d married a twenty-three-year-old.”

  “You should live here.” Giovanna yawned. “Here in Europe, you still have the chance to lose your lovers to someone your own age.”

  Much nicer, they’d agreed, clinking glasses.

  There was no stone, arch, column, pediment, square inch of painting in the vicinity that Harry couldn’t expound upon. He knew what pirates had lived in which of the caves below them, the Latin names of the trees, all twisted by wind, the composition of the rocks…Did Kate see the dome way off there? They didn’t have time to stop, unfortunately, but it was a very important church, as no doubt she knew, built by X in the twelfth century, rebuilt by Y in the thirteenth, then built again on the orders of the Archbishop of Z…Inside there was a wonderful Annunciation by A, a wonderful pietà by B, and of course she’d seen reproductions, hadn’t she, of the altarpiece…

  It wasn’t fair. He expected everyone to be as yielding to beautiful objects as he was, as easily transported. Her expression, she hoped, as the avalanche of information—art gossip—rained down, was not the one she saw daily on the faces of her students. Her poor, exasperating students, so resentful, so uncomprehending…The truth was that most of them had so many problems in their lives that each precious, clarifying fragment Kate struggled to hand over to them was just one more intrusion. Yet there she stood, day after day, talking, talking, talking…And every once in a while—she could see it—it was as if a door opened in a high stone wall.

  “…but I’m boring you,” Harry was saying. “You’re a serious person! And my life, I’m afraid, has been devoted, frivolously, to beauty.”

  True, true, she was a grunting barbarian, he was a rarified esthete. She was a high-school biology teacher, he was a—well, he was a what, exactly? As far as she could gather, whatever it was he did seemed to involve finding art or rarities, oddities, for collectors and billionaires and grotesquely expensive hotels. He’d traveled all over, there’d been a wife or two, his family had come from everywhere—Central Asia, all around the Mediterranean…

  “Mendelssohn or salsa?” He waved a handful of CD’s “To—what is it? To soothe our savage—Ack!” He honked and swerved as a giant tour bus in front of them braked shudderingly on the precipitous incline. “They have no idea how to drive! Simply not a clue!”

  For miles before and behind them, caravans of tour buses clogged the road, winding along the cliffs. “Is there always this much traffic?” Kate asked.

  “From now through October it will be sheer hell,” Harry announced with satisfaction, as though he’d only been waiting for an opening. “And why do they come here? For what? We’ll see them later, shuffling around in the churches while the guides shout and flap their arms. Blinking, loading their cameras…They’d much prefer to be at Disney World. They are at Disney World. Little ducks and mice frolic with them along the road of life. So why come to bother us here, on this road? Ah, we’ll never know, we’ll never know. And neither will they.”

  “Americans, I suppose,” Kate said meekly.

  “Not necessarily, my dear.” Harry reached over and patted her hand. “Imbeciles pour in from all over.”

  One was supposed to get used to things, Kate thought, not find them increasingly annoying; that was the point of getting older. And how old was he, anyhow? It stood to reason that he was around her age. Probably a few years older.

  Though actually, he looked no age in particular. He was wildly vigorous and agile, and an urgent, clocklike energy pulsed off him. He’d ordered wine when they’d stopped for lunch, in a restaurant overhanging the cliffs where they’d soon be driving again, and her heart had dropped along with the level of alcohol in the bottle, to the very bottom. Harry, however, showed no sign of having consumed a thing. “Don’t worry,” he’d said as they left—whether noting some expression she’d failed to inhibit, or engaging in a private dialogue—“I’m not drunk.” And indeed, though the coastline waved back and forth beneath them like streamers and the racy little car flew out over the heart-stopping curves, it snapped back onto the road as if it were attached by elastic. Way below them, the water sparkled and ruffled, on and on and on.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time they reached their destination. Majestic and serene, the hotel rose up in front of them with the terraced cliffs, the clouds, the trees, as if it had sprung from a magic seed.

  Harry chivalrously swung her suitcase from the trunk and carried it into the lobby. “What on earth do you have in here?” Rowan would have asked, smiling to illustrate that he wasn’t criticizing her. Harry, of course, was completely indifferent. Or perhaps he knew perfectly well what weighed those hundreds of pounds—all the jars of things she’d taken, humiliatingly, to smearing on her skin or swallowing.

  And what about Harry’s elegant little accoutrement, hardly bigger than a briefcase? What could he have fitted into that? A set of tiny tools, no doubt—wrenches, screwdrivers, brushes—with which to disassemble himself and clean his parts…

  The hotel, vast as it was, had apparently been a private villa at some time. The cool sound of bells and leaf-scented air pooled here and there in the lobby. Afternoon sunlight, yellow as wildflowers, drowsed on the floors. Marble, stone, wood seemed to breathe faintly…

  Splendid in uniform, the men at the desk opened their arms at the sight of Harry, tilting their heads to the side and exclaiming softly with delight. As they came forward, he clasped their hands, speaking a few words to each, like the true king returning. They were now referring to her, Kate realized at a certain point. One of the men caught her look of slight confusion and addressed her in English. “We were discussing, signora, which room would be most suitable for you. It would be possible either the Rose Room, which has a fireplace and a magnificent four-poster bed. Or the room at the easternmost end of the hotel is also available, with a balcony overlooking the water.”

 
She glanced at Harry. “It doesn’t matter,” he said expansively. “They’re both lovely rooms.” He turned to the desk clerk. “Perhaps the East Room—” He gave her a brief, inquiring smile. “—Yes. The signora might enjoy breakfasting on her balcony.”

  Oh, right—she’d been meant to speak, but never mind. How wonderful, just to go upstairs now, to sink back against giant feather pillows…A man in a red and gold jacket stood slightly behind her with her suitcase. Well, yes, of course—Harry wasn’t going to show her to her room.

  “Well—” she turned toward him and held out her hand “—you must be exhausted.”

  “Not at all,” he said, taking her hand absently and glancing around as if for a place to put it. “I never get tired.”

  Just as she’d feared. And it seemed that there were several churches, several villas, a little museum, and an ex-convent that were absolutely obligatory.

  “And would you care to wash up?” he said instructively. “We’ll find one another in the bar.” As she followed the bellman out of the lobby, she glimpsed, from the corner of her eye, Harry bending to kiss the beringed claw of an ancient lady in black, almost hidden within the wings of an enormous brocaded chair.

  Kate followed, up a flowing staircase and along silent corridors. The bellman opened the massive wooden door to her room, and then the French doors onto her balcony. Lordy! No wonder no one else in the lobby looked much like a schoolteacher. Water gleams fleeted in, rocking the room gently; the high ceiling curved above her, and the stone floors floated underfoot.

  Though she took as little time as possible, only slipping her few things onto the satiny hangers and splashing at her face, when she reached the bar Harry had almost emptied a glass of something. “Ah!” he said, leaping to his feet as though she’d been dawdling for an hour. “Oh. But forgive me—will you have something to drink before we set off, or would you prefer a look around before the light goes completely?”