The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (11 page)

“That’s too bad,” I said, and neither of us seemed to have anything else to say. “Anyway.”

“I’m going straight home when I finish up here today to get some sleep,” he said. “But if you’re not all booked up tomorrow evening, why don’t I come by? I’ll bring a picnic.”

Rafe arrived the next night laden down with paper bags. “Assiette de eats,” he said. He put the bags in the kitchen and hung up his coat. “What sensational flowers!”

“Aren’t they,” I said. “Oh, Rafe—squab! And grapes—and—good heavens!—
mauve
paper plates!”

“I had my reasons,” he said. “I calculated that they would be an excellent foil for the—yes,
perfect
—pesto.”

“Oh, and radicchio-and-fennel salad! My absolute favorite. You always find such good things, Rafe.”

“It’s my flair for life,” he said with an odd look on his face.

“It’s true, Rafe. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about you,” I said, but the odd look hovered for a moment.

I opened a bottle of nice wine that I’d picked up and poured us paper cupfuls of it, and we made ourselves at home with our picnic, among the cartons.

“I got a new secretary today,” Rafe said. “I found her in a club the other night. She’s a cute kid, but the trouble with interviewing someone in a club is that you can’t hear what they’re saying to you. I guess I’ll have to spend this week showing her how to answer the phone.”

“Rafe,” I said. How good it was to be sitting around together.

“What is this?” he said, reaching over. “China silk?” I sat very still while he rubbed my collar.

“Nice,” he said, but by the time he sat back, I could see his thoughts were on something else.

“What is it, Rafe?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a thing, not a thing.

“You know,” he said after a moment. “I never meant you to think, that time, that I was saying that you were self-absorbed, or something of that sort.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. When had he said I was self-absorbed? “I don’t think of myself as a particularly self-absorbed person, so it wouldn’t really have struck home in any case.” How strange. So Rafe had accused me of being self-absorbed.

“Anyhow,” Rafe said, “I wanted to make sure you knew I never meant anything like that.”

“Rafe, darling,” I said, “would you mind getting me a glass of water?” I seemed to have gone through quite a bit of wine without really noticing. “Thanks.”

“It’s strange, you know,” Rafe said. “I always thought Heather and I were having these conversations. And that I was listening to her. And even learning things from her. But I don’t think she was ever actually saying anything in particular, or even
being
anything in particular. I just sort of concocted it all by myself. I was really just staring at her, because she’s so pretty.”

I went to the kitchen and got us a bottle of Cognac. “No sense wasting this on the subtenant.”

“I’m sorry about calling so late the other night,” Rafe said.

“Why not?” I said. “We’re friends.” I certainly wished he’d get around to telling me what was going on between him and Heather. “Anyhow, I guess everything’s resolved itself, in one way or another.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It was just one of those night things that happen when you’re by yourself sometimes. And it just evaporated.”

“Yes,” I said. I poured us both some more Cognac. “I guess you just figured it out on your own.”

“Well, actually,” he said, “I did call her. And we talked. We had a nice talk. We agreed that we were just never suited to each other, but that we’d always consider each other friends. Anyhow, she’s gotten all mixed up with some guy. Evidently she thinks it’s serious.”

We drank and sat in the dim light and talked, and then it was very late, somehow, and Rafe was getting his coat. Rafe was putting on his lovely soft coat, and he was going to go.

“Well, good night,” he said. “Thanks again.”

“Rafe,” I said suddenly, to my own astonishment, “why do you suppose you and I never had an affair?” Oh, was I going to be hung over in the morning!

“Well,” he said, pausing at the door, “for one thing, you were a married lady.”

“I know,” I said. “But for another thing?”

“Oh, I just don’t think it would have worked, do you?” he said. “We’re too much alike, really, aren’t we? We’d climb into bed and I’d say, ‘Great sheets—where’d you get them?’ Or I’d take off my clothes and you’d say, ‘Oh, fabulous—underwear with bison.’ That sort of thing. We just wouldn’t really have been able to concentrate.”

“Underwear with bison?” I said. “Really?” Rafe smiled. “Rafe,” I said. “We’re actually not alike anymore, though, are we? You’ve changed.”

“Now, now,” he said. “Don’t do that.” He licked a little tear from my cheek. “Yum.” And he gave me a little kiss on the forehead.

I leaned against the door as it closed behind him. Oh, Jesus. I was actually dizzy! I must really have gotten myself loaded. In any case, it was truly late, and sooner or later I was going to have to stand myself upright without benefit of the door and take myself off to bed. Which would entail turning around. Turning around to the sight of those cartons, that vase, the empty mirror, the nothing, nothing, nothing at all that had come of my life in New York. And what was it I was planning to get for myself on Patmos, then? What? Rocks, sheep, a stack of fish on a plate, that’s what! And I turned, and stood, and looked, supporting myself against the door, for what felt like hours.

At least, that was what I remembered, in a bunched-up sort of way, when I woke up the next morning, somehow not hung over at all.

Rafe and I never managed to get in touch with each other before I left—I suppose I was just too busy getting ready. Oddly enough, though, I did run into Heather just about the day before I left, when the sort of impulse that later compels one not to jeer at people who turn to their horoscopes in the paper led me to Saks. It was she who recognized me first, even though I had been staring straight at the beautiful face I should have known so well.

“I hear you’re going off on adventures,” she said, taking my hand in a way that made me feel strangely at ease. “Are you excited?”

“I suppose so,” I said. “Yes.” I felt a bit dazed looking at her. She really was lovely. Very…vivid, in some way. “How did you hear I was leaving? From Rafe?”

“Yes,” she said. “He called a week or so ago. I was glad. We’d just let things get bad, and I hate to leave things bad, or even just unresolved, with someone I’ve cared about. Don’t you?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “I suppose I must.”

“So he came over and we talked. Really conversed, I mean, for a change. Instead of just fighting, or falling into bed, or any of those things you do with people when you’re breaking up with them. It was nice. I was really glad he called. I couldn’t have just called him, you know, even though I wanted to give him my news. It would have sounded like I was giving him a last chance, almost—that sort of thing, don’t you think? But it really was all over between us quite a while ago.”

“News?” I said. “Last chance?”

“Oh,” she said, and stopped. “That is, I’m going to get married, you see.”

“Really,” I said. “How wonderful.”

“Yes,” she said. “In fact, Neil’s supposed to meet me here any minute. You know, I feel I know you so well, even though we only met once. Rafe talked about you so often, though, I almost feel that we’ve…shared something.”

“I feel the same way,” I said.

“Oh, look,” she said. “There’s Neil now. I can introduce you.”

It took me a moment to place the man who had walked up to us and was putting his arm around Heather. He certainly didn’t look much like Brent, that drip in the car that Lydia was doing something or other with, although that, I saw, was who (in a manner of speaking, of course) he was. In person he seemed like a nice young man, and he was obviously very much in love, as, obviously, was Heather herself.

“Well, I’ve got to get myself upstairs and look for some new clothes,” she said.

“Yes,” I said faintly. She would be needing some.

“Nice to meet you,” Neil said, as he and Heather washed away from me in the crowd.

What a marvelous-looking baby it was going to be, with parents like Heather and Brent—Neil, rather. Or Lydia, to think of it another way, and Neil, or Brent. Or Rafe. As a matter of fact. Come to think of it.

So many faces, so many faces. People were pouring in and out of the doors, swarming between the counters, rising in swatches on the escalators. So many faces just right there, and any face possible from all the branchings of history for that baby. The faces around me swam and blended, and for an instant I was almost too dizzy to stand, but then I saw Heather’s face, quite, of course, itself, and all the other faces consolidated properly again upon their discrete owners, as Heather waved back to me from the escalator and smiled. And even though I had dozens of things to do,
dozens
of things, I stopped to wave back and watch as, brighter and brighter, a dwindling dot in the stream of shoppers, Heather was borne away to some other floor.

During the best time, when it was still warm in the afternoons and the sky was especially blue and the smell of spoiling apples rose up from the ground, Lee and I drove down from the high meadows with our stuff in the van, looking for someplace to live.

The night before we left, we went down the road to say goodbye to Tom and Johanna. Johanna looked like glass, but Tom was flushed and in a violent good humor. He passed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s back and forth to Lee and slapped him on the back and talked a mile a minute about different places he had lived and people he had met and bets he had won and whatnot, so I figured he and Johanna had been fighting before we got there.

“Done a lot of traveling?” Tom asked me.

“No,” I said. He knew I hadn’t.

“Well, you’ll enjoy it,” he said. “You’ll enjoy it.”

Tom was making an effort, I suppose, because I was leaving.

“Hey,” he said to Lee, having completed his effort, “are you going to see Miles?”

“I guess we might,” Lee said. “Yeah, actually, we could.”

“Who’s Miles?” I said.

“Is he still with that girl?” Tom said. “The one who—”

“No,” Lee interrupted, laughing. “He’s back with Natalie.”

“Really?” said Johanna. “Listen, if you do see him, tell him I still wear the parka he left at our place that day.” Tom stared at her, but she smiled.

“Who’s Miles?” I said.

“Someone who used to live around here. Before I brought you back up the mountain with me,” Lee said, turning to face me. His eyes, when he’s been thinking about something else, are like a blaze in an empty ware house, and I caught my breath.

After dinner Lee and I walked back to our place, and as the house came into view I tried to fix it in my memory. It already looked skeletal, though, like something dead on a beach.

“That’s what it is,” Lee said. “Old bones. A carapace. You’re creating pain for yourself by trying to make it something more.”

I looked again, letting it be bones, and felt light. I wanted to leave behind with the house the old bones of my needs and opinions. I wanted to be unencumbered, a warrior like Lee. When we’d met, Lee had said to me, “I feel like I have to take care of you.”

“That’s good,” I had said.

“No it isn’t,” he had said.

I wondered if he ever thought about places he had lived, other faces, old girlfriends. Once in a while he seemed bowed down with a weight of shelved memories. Having freight in storage, though, is what you trade to travel light, I sometimes thought, and at those moments I thought it was as much for him as for me that I wanted Lee so badly to stay with me.

The first night of driving we stopped in Pennsylvania.

“We’re very close to Miles and Natalie’s,” Lee said. “It would be logical to stop by there tomorrow.”

“Where do they live?” I said.

Lee took out a big U.S. road map. “They’re over here, in Baltimore.”

“That’s so far,” I said, following his finger.

“In a sense,” he said. “But on the other hand, look at, say, Pittsburgh.” His finger alighted inches from where we were. “Or Columbus.”

“Or Louisville!” I said. “Look how far that is—to Louisville!”

“You think that’s far?” Lee said. “Well, listen to this—ready? Poplar Bluff!”

“Tulsa!” I said. “Wait—Oklahoma City!”

We both started to shout.

“Cheyenne!”

“Flagstaff!”

“Needles, Barstow, Bishop!”

“Eureka!” we both yelled at once.

We sat back and eyed the map. “That was some trip,” Lee said.

“Are we going to do that?” I said.

Lee shrugged. “We’ll go as far as we want,” he said.

After all that, it looked on the map like practically no distance to Baltimore, but by the time we reached it I was sick of sitting in the van, and I hoped Natalie and Miles were the sort of people who would think of making us something to eat.

“What if they don’t like me?” I said when we parked.

“Why wouldn’t they like you?” Lee said.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know them.

“They’ll like you,” Lee said. “They’re friends of mine.”

Their place turned out to be a whole floor of a building divided up by curves of glass bricks. Darkness eddied around us and compressed the light near its sources, and the sounds our shoes made on the wood floor came back to us from a distance.

Natalie must have been just about my age, but there might be an infinite number of ways to be twenty, I saw, shocked. She sat us down on leather sofas the size of whales and brought us things to drink on a little tray, and she wore a single huge red earring. It was clear that she and Miles and Lee had talked together a lot before. There were dense, equidistant silences, and when one of them said something, it was like a stone landing in a still pond. I watched Natalie’s earring while a comma of her black hair sliced it into changing shapes. After a while Miles and Lee stood up. They were going to see some building in another part of the city. “Anything we need, babe?” Miles asked Natalie.

“Pick up a couple of bottles of wine,” she said. “Oh, yeah, and some glue for this.” She opened her fist to disclose a second red earring in pieces in her palm.

“What’s the matter?” I heard Lee say, and he was speaking to me.

Natalie and I moved over to the kitchen to make dinner, and she asked me how long Lee and I had been together.

“He’s so fabulous,” she said. “Are you thinking of getting married?”

“Not really,” I said. We’d discussed it once when we’d gotten together. “It seems fairly pointless. Is there anything I can do?”

“Here,” she said, handing me a knife and an onion. “Miles and I got married. His parents made us. They said they’d cut Miles off if we didn’t.”

“Is it different?” I said.

“Sort of,” she said. “It’s turned out to be an O.K. thing, actually. We used to, when we had a problem or something, just talk about it to the point where we didn’t have to deal with it anymore. But now I guess we try to fix it. Does Lee still hate watercress?”

“No,” I said. Watercress? I thought.

“It’s very good,” Natalie said, “but I still wouldn’t be surprised if it ended tomorrow.”

“Natalie,” I said, “would you pierce my ears?”

“Sure,” she said. “Just let me finish this stuff first.” She took back from me the knife and the onion, which was still whole because I hadn’t known what to do with it.

When Lee and Miles got back, I put the ice cube I was holding against my earlobe into the sink, and we all sat down for dinner.

“Nice,” Lee said, holding his glass. Lee and I had always drunk wine out of the same glasses we drank everything else out of, and it was not the kind of wine you’d have anything to say about, so Lee with his graceful raised glass was an odd sight. So odd a sight, in fact, that it seemed to lift the table slightly, causing it to hover in the vibrating dimness.

“It is odd, isn’t it,” I said, feeling oddness billow, “that this is the way we make our bodies live.”

Miles lifted his eyebrows.

“I mean,” I said, forgetting what I did mean as I noticed that Lee had picked the watercress out of his salad, “I mean that it’s odd to sit like this, in body holders around a disk, and move little heaps of matter from smaller disks to our mouths on little metal shovels. It seems like an odd way to make our bodies live.”

I looked around at the others.

“Seems odd to me,” Miles said. “I usually lie on the floor with my chin in a trough, sucking rocks.”

“Miles,”
Natalie said, and giggled.

That night the clean, clean sheets wouldn’t get warm, so I climbed out of bed and put on Lee’s jacket and sat down to watch Lee sleep. He shifted pleasurably, and in the moonlight he looked as comfortable and dangerous as a lion. I watched him and waited for day, when he would get up, and I would give him back his jacket, and we could leave this place where he drank wine from a wineglass and strangers knew him so well.

In the morning Natalie and Miles asked if we wanted to stay, but Lee said we couldn’t. We had planned to start out by the end of summer, he told them, and we were late.

Outside we saw how the light was already thin and banded across the highway, and we drove fast into sunset and winter. We were quiet mostly, and when we spoke, it was softly, like TV cowboys expecting an ambush.

That evening we bought some medicine at a drugstore because my ear had swollen up and I had a fever. I lay my head back into sliding dreams and woke into free-fall.

“Hey,” Lee said, smoothing my hair back from my face. “You’re asleep. You know that?” He scooped me over into his lap, and I nuzzled into his foggy gray T-shirt. “So look, killer,” he said. “You want to stay here or you want to come in back with me?”

The next day my fever was gone and my ear was better.

For a while we were still where the expressways are thick coils and headlights and brake lights interweave at night in splendor. In the dark we would pull off to sleep in the corner of a truck stop or in a lot by a small highway, and in the morning, heat or cold, intensified by our metal shell, would wake us tangled in our blankets, and we would make love while fuel trucks roared past, rattling the van. Then we would look out the window to see where we were and drive off to find a diner or a Howard Johnson’s.

We were spending more money than we had expected to, and Lee said that his friend Carlos, who lived in St. Louis, might be able to find him a few days’ work. Lee looked through some scraps of paper and found Carlos’s address, but when we got there, a group of people standing on the front steps told us that Carlos had moved. The group looked like a legation, with representatives of the different sizes and ages of humans, that was waiting to impart some terrible piece of information to a certain traveler. One of them gave us a new address for Carlos, which was near Nashville. Lee had never mentioned Carlos, so I assumed they weren’t very close friends; but expectation had whetted Lee’s appetite to see him, it seemed, because we left the group waiting on the steps and turned south.

Lee and Carlos were all smiles to see each other.

“What kind of money are you looking to make?” Carlos asked when we had settled ourselves in the living room.

“Nothing much,” Lee said. “Just a little contingency fund. I’m clean these days.”

“Well, listen,” Carlos said. “Why don’t you take the store for a week or two. I had to fire the guy I had managing it, and I’ve been dealing with it myself, but this would be an opportunity for me to look into some other stuff I’ve had my eye on.” Carlos opened beers for himself and Lee. “Could I get you something?” he asked me, frowning.

“I’d like some beer, too,” I said.

“Here,” he said. “Wait. I’ll get you a glass.”

“Get back to Miami much?” Lee said.

“Too crowded these days, if you know what I mean,” Carlos said. “Besides, I’ve pretty much stopped doing anything I can’t handle locally. This is just where I live now, for whatever reason. And I’ve got my business. I don’t know. It’s a basis, you know? Something to continue from.” He looked away from Lee and sighed.

During the days, when Lee and Carlos were out, I sat in back watching the sooty light travel from one side of the yard to the other. Sometimes a little boy played in an adjoining yard, jabbing with a stick at the clumps of grass there, which were stiff and gray with dirt. He was gray with dirt himself, and gray under the dirt. His nose ran, and the blue appliqué bear on the front of his overalls looked stunned.

I wondered what that boy had in mind for himself—whether his attack on the grass was some sort of self-devised preparation for an adulthood of authority and usefulness or whether he pictured himself forever on that bit of dirt, heading toward death in bear overalls of graduated size. I took to going in when I saw him and watching TV.

The night before we left Carlos’s, Lee and I were awake late. We didn’t have much to say, and after a while I noticed I was hungry.

“What? After that meal I made?” Lee said. “All right, let’s go out.”

Carlos was still awake, too, sitting in the living room with headphones on.

“Great,” he said. “There’s an all-night diner with sensational burgers.”

“Burgers,” Lee said. “You still eat that shit?”

Going into the diner, Lee and Carlos were a phalanx in themselves with their jackets and jeans and boots and belts, and I was proud to have been hungry. I ordered warrior food, and soon the waitress rendered up to me a plate of lacy-edged eggs with a hummock of potatoes and butter-stained toast, and to Lee and Carlos huge, aromatic burgers.

“Are you going to see Kathryn?” Carlos asked.

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “It depends.”

“I’d like to see her myself, come to think of it. She’s a fantastic woman,” Carlos said, balancing a French-fry beam on a French-fry house he was making. “She always was the best. You know, it’s been great having you guys stay, but it makes me realize how much I miss other people around here. Maybe I should go out to the coast or something. Or at least establish some sort of nonridiculous romance.”

“What about Sarah?” Lee said.

“Sarah,” Carlos said. “Jesus.” He turned to me. “Has Lee told you all about this marvel of technology?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, I mean, listen, man,” Carlos said, shaking his head. “She’s a hot-looking lady, no question about it, but when I said ‘nonridiculous’ I had in mind someone you wouldn’t be afraid to run into in the living room.” He shook his head again and started drumming his knife on the table. “She sure is one hot-looking lady, though. Well, you know her.”

“We have to get up really early,” I said.

“That’s O.K.,” Lee said, but Carlos stood up. He looked exhausted.

“Yeah, sorry,” he said. “Let’s pull the plug on it.”

Over the next few days I thought of Carlos often. His face had been shadowed when we said goodbye, so I couldn’t recall it, and I thought how if I had been his girlfriend instead of Lee’s I would have stayed there with him in that living room that seemed to just suck up light and would have heard from the inside the door slam and the van’s motor start.

Lee and I drove back east a bit, to have a look at the Smokies. We parked the van in a campground under a bruise-colored sunset and set off on foot to pick up some food to cook outside on a fire. There were bugs, though, even though it was chilly, and the rutted clay road slipped and smacked underfoot, so we stopped at a Bar-B-Que place, where doughy families shouted at each other under throbbing fluorescent lights.