The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (10 page)

“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.”

It occurred to me that this quality Rafe so touchingly considered her to have was perhaps her quality (and it truly was a very attractive one) of youthful, vigorous ignorance concerning life’s more serious sides. “Poor Rafe,” I said. Poor Rafe.

“So. I’ve missed you,” he said. “Tell me what you’ve been up to. Any luck with the job hunting?”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’ve decided to do some traveling before I tie myself down again. Some friends have asked me to come visit them on Patmos for a while, and I thought, oh, why not? I’ve been dying to get out of my place, anyway, so I’m packing everything up and I’m getting a subtenant.”

“You’re leaving?” Rafe said, looking up, and we looked right smack into each other’s face.

I was just getting to sleep that night when the phone rang. It was Rafe. “Hello there,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I was wrong,” he said. “I had to call you. I misinterpreted the meaning of my own feelings.” Had I been asleep, perhaps, when the phone rang? “I realized after we talked tonight,” he said, “that I was wrong. If I turn away from this, I’m turning away from…from everything. I know that, and I’m going to ask Heather to marry me.”

“I see,” I said. I had a headache. I must have been asleep when the phone rang.

“That fear that I mentioned to you—it’s just nothing, do you see? It’s just something like—like that law in physics—you know?—that the strength of the reaction is equal to the…to the…the whatever. Remember that law? Isn’t there some kind of law like that?”

“I don’t know.” My
head.
“I got a C in physics.”

“Whatever,” he said. “What I mean is that the reason I’ve been so frightened is because it’s so important to me, the possibility of a life with Heather—a real life. It’s a gift, I’ve realized. No, not a gift—an invitation, a test. If I’m able to accept it, do you see, for that reason alone I’m good enough to be given it.”

“I see,” I said. He sounded actually feverish.

“And, really, I actually do love her,” he said.

“Well, then,” I said. “That’s what counts.”

“I wanted to call you right away,” he said. “Because we were talking. You know.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I said. “Well, good night, Rafe, dear. Thank you for calling.”

God damn it. I hated being awakened at night. I could never get back to sleep. Maybe I’d go make myself some warm milk. No one else was going to do it, anyhow, that was for sure.

I took out the milk, and my one pot and one cup that weren’t packed yet, and very sensibly I poured, instead of milk into the pot, Scotch into the cup, thereby saving myself some dishwashing, and wandered into the living room, which was piled high with cartons prepared for storage.

A gift, huh? An invitation, a test? What on earth had happened to Rafe’s brains in the few hours since I’d seen him? Jesus, I felt terrible, though. And if the truth be told, in fact, the shaming truth, another thing that I actually seemed to feel was (oh, God!)
lonely
! As if I were being excluded from this “real life,” this…this “everything” that Rafe imagined he was being invited to share in! How amazing! I’m really not the sort of person who feels jealous of someone else’s happiness (even supposing this folly of Rafe’s were to be considered happiness). I’m not the sort of person who feels that one loses by another’s gain. I’m the sort of person who takes pleasure in a friend’s pleasure. Oh, I know there are people who believe the realm of human activity to be an exchange, as it were, where for every good thing acquired, some good thing has to be given back. “Here are my teeth,” for instance, such people believe you would say when they fell out. “Now may I have that harvest table that’s in the window of Pierre Deux?” These people believe that there is some system that ensures that you cannot have yards of eyelashes in addition to a talent for entertaining, unless the news vendor on the corner falls down a flight of steps and has to be hospitalized. And people of this opinion, naturally enough, quail when another person, even a friend as close as Rafe, threatens to bite into the world’s short supply of happiness. But I am not of this opinion; I do not believe these things, and even if I did, I would be prepared nonetheless to be happy for Rafe. Even if he was making an awful mistake.

But then, the problem remained of why people did lose their teeth. Why didn’t I have yards of eyelashes? Why would a news vendor have to fall down a flight of steps? Why would anyone have to be a news vendor at all? Obviously, if one were to understand all this, one would have to read some horrible math text about the laws of chance and probability. Anyhow, my head was still killing me.

How inhospitable my own living room seemed! Just all those cartons, and a huge, gilt, good-for-nothing mirror, exactly as empty as the room, and a few oddments I was leaving for the comfort of my subtenant, including a hideous Bristol vase that John had given to me early on in our marriage. He’d said the color reminded him of his childhood. Yuck. I’d offered it back to him, naturally, when he moved out, but he’d wanted it to stay with me. John was a loyal old boy, no doubt about that—loyal to the vase, loyal to his childhood—and now, from what I heard, he was being loyal to Marcia Meaver.

I slept, finally, for a few hours, after it had already become light, and got up just in time to catch the final segment of that day’s “This Brief Candle.” I turned on the set, and there was Heather (well, Lydia) right in my living room with her sister Carolyn and Carolyn’s husband, Jad.

“Chad, darling,” Carolyn said. (So it
was
Chad! I
swear
it was Chad.) “That was Hank on the phone. Something peculiar has happened at Mr. Armstrong’s office. I must go right away.”

“Well,” Chad said to Lydia after the door slammed. He cleared his throat. “Guess I’ll just go into my workroom and try to get a few things done.” He smiled in a sickened, hopeless attempt at heartiness.

“Why don’t you?” Lydia said, never taking her eyes off him for a second. “Why don’t you, Chad? But first, my darling brother-in-law, I’d like you to sit down. Because you and I have a little matter to discuss. One that isn’t going to be getting any littler, if you see what I mean. So we can’t put it off much longer.” Close-up of Lydia’s face, inscrutably triumphant.

I stared and stared at the screen, but all there was to see, suddenly, was a batch of brats hell-bent on wrecking their clothes. I turned off the TV and sat, exhausted, while the little white light in the center boiled brighter and brighter until it was gone, and then, on some overpowering and incomprehensible impulse, I went to the phone and I called Cookie. Her line was busy, and even though it stayed busy for a good half hour, I just kept standing there, for some reason, dialing her number.

“Hello, dear!” she said, when I finally got through. “How marvelous to hear your voice! It’s been weeks!”

“Hasn’t it,” I agreed. “Well, except for the Schillers’ the other night.”

“But that hardly counts, does it, dear?” Cookie said. “One feels one must creep about in disguise there, doesn’t one, like an Arab.”

“One does indeed,” I said. Did Arabs creep about in disguise?

“It’s torture, isn’t it, how one daren’t say a word at the Schillers’, or one is sure to read some horrible twisted version of it in some publication the next morning. But on the other hand, of course, one must keep one’s own ears open because of all that information flying around. I suppose it’s rather what the agora must have been.”

“I suppose so,” I said. The agora? Arabs? Was Cookie taking some sort of course? An alphabetical survey of everything? I myself couldn’t remember for the life of me what the agora had been.

“Each time I go to the Schillers’ I come home utterly destroyed,” she said. “And each time, I swear I’m never going to go again. But how can one turn one’s back on such a spectacle?”

“This one looked relatively sedate to me,” I said.

“Sedate!” Cookie roared. “Oh. You missed the bit when Marjorie went to get her coat and found Rupert Fallodin making
advances
to Alison.”

“So what?” I said. “Some married people find each other attractive.”

“I know that, dear,” Cookie said with dignity. “But Rupert has been seeing Marjorie for months, you know, and it was quite a shock to her. And when she came downstairs she made a few remarks about him. At the top of her lungs, to be precise. It was extraordinary! Some very unusual habits Rupert has, it seems. Of course, Marjorie had polished off about a quart of Scotch by that time. I mean, so had I, naturally, but so had she.” Cookie barked happily. “Oh, it was a very steamy evening. Did you see Melissa Hober? She was tagging along behind Constance Ripp like an anthropologist tags along behind his Indian. Once, Constance stopped short, and Melissa almost broke that incredible chin of hers against Constance’s skull!”

“It’s hard to imagine Melissa tagging along behind anyone,” I said.

“Oh, she can accommodate just about any degree of self-abasement if she thinks it’ll get her published, you know. Constance is taking over as the poetry editor of
Life and Times
, you see, and evidently Melissa knows that Constance has an unfailing weakness for a pretty face, which is something Melissa obviously imagines herself to be in possession of.”

“Constance?” I asked, amazed. “Is Constance gay?” How could Constance be gay? I was the sort of person who was usually very perceptive about other people, and it had never occurred to me that Constance was gay!

“Is Constance gay!” Cookie hooted. “Does a pope shit in the woods? Oh, dear! I never would have said a thing if I’d thought for a moment that there was one living soul who didn’t know. Well, I’m sure it isn’t really a secret, even though Constance does put on that ridiculous act. But what did you think Honoria della Playa was—the au pair girl?”

“Constance had an affair with Honoria della Playa?” I said.

“Oh! My mouth!” Cookie said. “But naturally I assumed you knew all about that.”

Oh, Cookie was having a splendid day with me. But I really didn’t have time for it. What was I doing on the phone, anyhow?! Here I was, participating in Cookie’s juvenile, pointless gossip, when I had to get all this stuff into storage! I really had to hang up immediately. Immediately. “Well, darling—” I said.

“Oh! By the way,” Cookie interrupted, “how’s Rafe these days? I haven’t seen him for absolutely ages.”

“I haven’t seen much of him myself, actually,” I said. “I don’t suppose you happen to have heard anything about him, have you?”

“Well, strange that you ask,” Cookie said. “Isn’t that strange. Amanda Krotnick called just now—right before you did, as it happens—and she was saying that she hasn’t seen Rafe in a blue moon, either.”

Amanda Krotnick. Amanda Krotnick. Oh, yes—her husband used to play squash with John.

“And Amanda told me that she’s been following Rafe’s girlfriend on TV, just out of a friendly interest in Rafe.” (What? Oh, yes, I suppose Rafe had mentioned her to me. I think she used to go to gallery openings with him and that sort of thing once in a while, when I didn’t feel like it or was tied up with John or something.) “And Amanda said that she thinks Heather’s TV alter ego, Lydia, you know, is pregnant by her sister’s husband, Jad. Isn’t that something? You see (this is according to Amanda, of course), it really puts Jad in a very peculiar position, because apparently Lydia plans to go ahead and have the baby, and sooner or later, naturally, she’s going to begin to show.”

I sat down right on a carton. “The things they do on those soap operas!” I said. “Imagine, if that’s what people did with their time!”

“Well,
I
certainly don’t have the time for them,” Cookie said. “And I don’t know how Amanda finds the time, either.”

I hadn’t meant that watching soap operas was an astonishing thing to do with one’s time, although, of course, it was. I had meant that it would be astonishing if people spent their time the way people on the soap operas spend their time. But I didn’t give a damn what I’d meant.

“So, what brings you to the phone, dear? What can I do for you?” Cookie said.

“Oh—” I said. “I was just calling. To say goodbye, really. I’m leaving soon, you know.”

“Heavens! That’s right!” she said. “We must get together before. Lunch next week?”

“Perfect,” I said. “Lunch.”

“Marvelous,” Cookie said. “We’ll call each other. Goodbye, dear.”

Oh, God. How awful, that mirrored view of cardboard cartons. The reflection of pure desolation. At least I wasn’t looking too awfully terrible myself, I noticed. Not too horrible, considering life and so forth. Somehow I’d managed to change remarkably little over the years.

All right—on with all the things to be done. What were they? Maybe I’d call Rafe.

“Hello,” said a voice that belonged to Rafe himself, and I didn’t have time to remember why I’d called. I’d been expecting a secretary to answer.

“Oh, Rafe,” I said. “I just called to say…to say that I hope you got some sleep last night.”

“I didn’t,” he said. My God, he sounded awful.