He looks back at me, sadly, almost pityingly, as if he had just read a dossier describing all my shortcomings. “Enough for me?” he says. “But what about you? What will you do?”
“I don’t mind,” I say. “It doesn’t matter—it’s fine. I’ll get some later—I have to do a big shop tomorrow, anyhow.”
“No,” he says. “I’ll go out now. Someplace will still be open.”
John’s car pulls out. The sound shrinks into a tiny dot and I feel it vanish with a little, inaudible pop. I listen, but I can’t hear a thing from Oliver’s room—no music, or sounds of movement. I’ll check on him later, after John has gone to sleep. I begin to brush my hair. It’s surprisingly soothing—it always has been; it’s like an erasure.
It’s extreme to say, “I do my best.” That can never quite be true, and in my opinion it’s often just a pretext for self-pity, or self-congratulation—an excuse to give yourself leeway. Still, I do try. I try reasonably hard to be sincerely cheerful, and to do what I can. Of course I understand Oliver’s feeling—that he’s lashed to the controls of some machine that eats up whatever is in its path. But this is something he’ll grow out of. As John says, this is some sort of performance Oliver is putting on for himself, some melodrama. And ultimately, people learn to get on with things. At least in your personal life, your life among the people you know and live with, you try to live responsibly. And when you have occasion to observe the difficult lives that others have to bear, you try to feel gratitude for your own good fortune.
I did manage to throw out his card. I couldn’t help seeing the name; the address of his office twinkled by. But I made an effort to cleanse them from my mind right away, and I think I’d succeeded by the time the card landed in the trash basket.
There’s no chance that he would turn out to be the person who appeared to me this afternoon, really no chance at all. And I doubt I’m the person he was imagining, either—which for all I know, actually, was simply a demented slut. And the fact is, that while I might not be doing Oliver or John much good, I’m certainly in a position to do them both a great deal of harm.
I’d intended to stay in today, to run some errands, to get down to some paperwork myself. But there we are. The things that are hidden! I felt such a longing to go into town, to go to the museum. It’s not something I often do, but it’s been a difficult week, grueling, really, with Oliver here, ranging about as if he were in a cage, talking talking talking about those hearings and heaven only knows what—and I kept picturing the silent, white galleries.
Looking at a painting takes a certain composure, a certain resolve, but when you really do look at one it can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It’s as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history—a sensation, really, that’s a lot like hope.
It was probably around eleven when I parked the car and went down into the metro. There was that awful, artificial light, like a disinfectant, and the people, silhouettes, standing and walking, the shapeless, senseless sounds. The trains pass through in gray streaks, and it’s as if you’ve always been there and you always will be. You can sense the cameras, now, too—that’s all new, I think, or relatively new—and you can even see some of them, big, empty eyes that miss nothing. You could be anywhere, anywhere at all; you could be an unknowing participant in a secret experiment. And with all those lives streaking toward you and streaking away, you feel so strongly, don’t you, the singularity and the accidentalness of your own life.
We passed each other on the platform. I hadn’t particularly noticed him until that second, and yet in some way he’d impressed himself so forcibly upon me it was as if I’d known him elsewhere.
I walked on for what seemed to be a long interval before I allowed myself to turn around—and he was turning, too, of course, at just the same instant. We looked at each other, and we smiled, just a little, and then I turned and went on my way again.
When I reached the end of the platform, I turned back, and he was waiting.
He was handsome, yes, and maybe that was all it was about, really. And maybe it was just that beautiful appearance of his that caused his beautiful clothing, too, his beautiful overcoat and scarf and shoes to seem, themselves, like an expression of merit, of integrity, of something attended to properly and tenderly, rather than an expression of mere vanity, for instance, or greed.
Because, there are a lot of attractive men in this world, and if one of them happens to be standing there, well, that’s nice, but that’s that. This is a different thing. The truth is that people’s faces contain specific messages, people’s faces are secret messages for certain other people. And when I saw this particular face, I thought, oh, yes—so that’s it.
The sky was scudding by out the taxi window, and we hardly spoke—just phrases, streamers caught for an instant as they flashed past in the bright, tumultuous air. And no one at the reception desk looked at us knowingly or scornfully, despite the absence of luggage and the classically suspect hour. It was as solemn and grand, in its way, as a wedding.
We had taken the taxi, had stood at the desk; we had done it—the thought kept tumbling over me like pealing bells as we rose up in the elevator, our hands lightly clasped. And we were solemn, and so happy, or at least I was, as we entered our room, the beautiful room that we might as well have been the first people ever to see—elated as if by some solution, when just minutes before we’d been on the metro platform, clinging fiercely, as if before a decisive separation, the way lovers do in war time.
Acknowledgments
Incalculable thanks to Elizabeth Richebourg Rea and the late Michael Rea of the Dungannon Foundation, champions and connoisseurs of the short story; to Verena Nolte and the Villa Waldberta; and to the Lannan Foundation—all the people there, and in Marfa, who were so kind to me!
Also by Deborah Eisenberg
Pastorale
Transactions in a Foreign Currency
Under the 82nd Airborne
Air: 24 Hours: Jennifer Bartlett
The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg
All Around Atlantis
Twilight of the Superheroes
THE COLLECTED STORIES OF DEBORAH EISENBERG. Copyright © 1997, 2006, 2010 by Deborah Eisenberg. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which these stories originally appeared: “Flotsam,” “What It Was Like, Seeing Chris,” “Transactions in a Foreign Currency,” “Broken Glass,” “A Cautionary Tale,” “Under the 82nd Airborne,” “Presents,” and “The Custodian,” in somewhat different form, in The New Yorker. “A Lesson in Traveling Light” in Vanity Fair; “The Robbery” and “In the Station” in Bomb; “Holy Week” in Western Humanities Review; “Across the Lake” and “Tlaloc’s Paradise” in the Voice Literary Supplement; “Someone to Talk To,” “Rosie Gets a Soul,” and “The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor” in The New Yorker; “Mermaids” first appeared in The Yale Review; “Twilight of the Superheroes” in Final Edition; “Some Other, Better Otto” in The Yale Review; “Like It or Not” in The Threepenny Review; “Window” and “Revenge of the Dinosaurs” in Tin House; and “The Flaw in the Design” in The Virginia Quarterly Review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eisenberg, Deborah.
[Short stories. Selections]
The collected stories of Deborah Eisenberg.—1st Picador ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8722-6
I. Title.
PS3555.I793A6 2010
813'.54—dc22
2010002081
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 88
