The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (19 page)

Eugene clapped. Then he made an obscene face and stuck a cookie into his mouth. “Oh, lady,” he said, holding the cookie out for me to finish. “These are fuckin’
scrumptious.
”

That was true. They were awfully good, and we munched on them quietly in the moonlit kitchen.

“So what about you and Ivan?” Eugene asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m starving with Ivan, but my life away from him—my own life—I’ve just let it dry up. Turn into old bits and pieces.”

“Well, honey,” Eugene said, “that’s not right. It’s your life.”

“But nothing changes or develops,” I said. “Ivan just can’t seem to decide what he wants.”

“No?” Eugene looked away tactfully, and I laughed out loud in surprise.

“That’s true,” I said. “I guess he decided a long time ago.” I stared down at the table, into our diminished cookie forest, and I felt Eugene staring at me. “Well, I didn’t want to be the one to end it, you know?” I said. “But time does change things, even if you can’t see it happen, and eventually someone has to be the one to say, ‘Well, now things have changed.’ Anyhow, it’s not his fault. He’s given me what he could.”

Eugene nodded. “Ivan’s a solitary kind of guy. I respect him.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I wish things were different.”

“I understand, dear.” Eugene patted my hand. “I hear you.”

“What about you?” I said. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Who, me?” he said. “No, I’m just an old whore. I’ve got a wife down in the States. Couldn’t live with her anymore, though.” He sighed and looked around. “Sixteen years. So what else you got to eat here? I’m still hungry.”

“Well,” I said. “There’s a roll of cookie dough in the freezer, but it’s Ivan’s, really.”

“We should eat it, then.” Eugene laughed. “Serve the arrogant bastard right.” I looked at him. “Don’t mind me, honey,” he said. “You know I’m crazy.”

I woke up once in the night, with Eugene snoring loudly next to me, and when I butted my head gently into his shoulder to quiet him down he wrapped his marvelous white arms around me. “Thought I forgot about you, huh?” he said distinctly, and started to snore again.

Sunlight forced my eyes open hours later. “Shit,” said a voice near me. “What time is it?” The sun had bleached out Eugene’s luminous beauty. With his pallor and coarse black hair, he looked like a phantom that one registers peripherally on the streets. “I’ve got a business appointment at noon,” he said, pulling on his jeans. “Think it’s noon?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It felt pleasantly early. “No clock.”

“I better hit the road,” he said. “Shit.”

“Here,” I said, holding out his knife.

“Yeah, thanks.” He pocketed it and looked at me. “You be O.K. now, lady? Going to take care of yourself for a change?”

“Yes,” I said. “By the way, how much does Ivan owe you?”

“Huh?” he said. “Hey, there’s my jacket. Right on the floor. Very nice.”

“Because he mentioned it before he left,” I said.

“Yeah?” Eugene said. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll come back for it, like—when? When’s that sucker going to get back?”

“No,” I said. There was really no point in waiting for Ivan. I wanted to conclude this business myself right now. “He forgot to tell me how much it was, but he left me plenty to cover.”

Eugene looked down at his boots. “Two bills.”

I put on the robe and counted out two hundred dollars from my purse. It was almost all I had left of the lively cash. “And he said thanks,” I said.

I stood at the open door until Eugene went through it. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Thanks yourself.”

At the landing he turned back to me. “Have a good one,” he called up.

I went back inside and put some eggs on to boil. Then I twirled slowly, making the stripes on the robe flare.

How on earth had I forgotten butter? The eggs were good, though. I enjoyed them.

After breakfast I rooted around and found a pail and sponges. It made me sad that Ivan had let the apartment get so filthy. He used to enjoy taking care of things. Then I sat down with a mystery I found on a shelf, and by the time Ivan walked in, late in the afternoon, I’d almost finished it.

“Looks great in here,” he said after he kissed me.

“I did some cleaning,” I said.

“That’s great,” he said. I thought of my own apartment. There would be a lot to do when I got home. “Jesus. Am I exhausted! That was some trip.”

“How’s Gary?” I said.

“Well, he was running a little fever when I got there, but he’s fine now,” Ivan said.

“Good,” I said. “Did he like his presents?”

“Uh-huh.” Ivan smiled. “Particularly that game that the marble rolls around in. He and I both got pretty good at it after the first few hundred hours.”

“I liked that one, too,” I said.

“He’s a good kid,” Ivan said. “He really is. I just hope Linda doesn’t make him into some kind of nervous wreck.”

“How’s she doing?” I asked.

“Well, she’s all right, I think. She’s trying to get a life together for herself at least. She’s getting a degree in dance therapy.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“She’ll be O.K. if she can just get over her dependency,” he said. “I’ll be interested to see how she does with this new thing.”

He would be monitoring her closely, I knew. What a tight family they had established, Ivan and Linda—not much room for anyone else. Of course, Gary and I had our own small parts in it. I’d probably been quite important in fencing out, oh, Micheline, for instance, just as Gary had been indispensable in fencing me out.

“Hey,” Ivan said. “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” He bent down and picked up a scarf.

“Someone named Eugene stopped by,” I said. “He said you owed him money.”

“Jesus. That’s right,” Ivan said. “Well, I’ll get around to it in the next day or so.”

“I took care of it myself,” I said.

“Really? Well, thanks. That’s great. I’ll reimburse you. Sorry you had to deal with him, though.”

“I liked him,” I said.

“You did?” Ivan said.

“You like him enough to do business with him,” I said.

“Yeah, I know I should be more compassionate,” Ivan said. “It’s just that he’s so hard to take.”

“Is any of that stuff true that he says?” I asked. “That he shot some guy? That he lived in the jungle?”

“Shot some guy? I don’t know. He has a pretty extensive fantasy life. But he fought in the war, yeah.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see. Jungle—Vietnam.”

“I keep forgetting,” Ivan said. “You’re really just a baby.”

“That must have been awful,” I said.

“Well, he could have gotten out of it if he didn’t want to do it,” Ivan said.

“He probably thought it was a good thing to do,” I said. “Besides, people can’t arrange their lives exactly the way they’d like to.”

“I disagree,” Ivan said. “People only like to think they can’t.”

“You know,” I said, trying to recall the events of the day before, “I was having some sort of conversation with a butcher about that yesterday.”

“A butcher?” Ivan said.

“Yes,” I said. “And, as I remember, he was saying something to the effect that people are only free to the extent that they recognize the boundaries of their lives.”

“Sounds pretty grim,” Ivan said. “And pretty futile.”

“Not exactly futile,” I said. “At least, I think his point was that if I know that over here is where I’m standing, well, that’s what gives rise to the consciousness that over there is where you’re standing, and automatically I get a map, a compass. So my situation—no matter how bad it is—is my source of power.”

“Well,” Ivan said. “That’s a very dangerous way of thinking, because it’s just that point of view that can be used to rationalize a lot of selfishness and oppression and greed. I’ll bet you were talking to that thief over by St. Lawrence who weighs his thumb, right?”

“Well, maybe I’m misrepresenting him,” I said. “He was pretty enigmatic.”

Ivan looked at me and smiled, but I could hardly bear the sweetness of it, so I turned away from him and went to the window.

How handsome he was! How I wished I could contain the golden, wounding hope of him. But it had begun to diverge from me—oh, who knew how long before—and I could feel myself already reforming: empty, light.

“So how are you?” Ivan said, joining me at the window.

“All right,” I said. “It’s good not to be waiting for you.”

“I’m sorry I missed Christmas here,” he said. “Montreal’s a nice place for Christmas. Next year, what do you say we try to do it right?”

He put his arm around me, and I leaned against his shoulder while we looked out at the place where I’d been walking the day before. The evening had arrived at the moment when everything is all the same soft color of a shadow, and the city seemed to be floating close, very close, outside the window. How familiar it was, as if I’d entered and explored it over years. Well, it had been a short time, really, but it would certainly be part of me, this city, long after I’d forgotten the names of the streets and the colors of the light, long after I’d forgotten the feel of Ivan’s shirt against my cheek, and the darkening sight separated from me now by a sheet of glass I could almost reach out to shatter.

As I exited through the terminal gate I thought, for an instant, that the plane had set me down in the exact spot from which it had lifted me up hours earlier, that I was distant only by some uniform tickings of the clock from the things I’d fled: the daily drive home from work past the hospital towers, the sight of the newspaper I’d combed every evening for articles that could penetrate the caul of pain and drugs in which my mother lay, the sounds of my own language, through which the furious chattering in my brain seemed to erupt with terrible force. Airports, train stations, hospitals—one looks much like another, whether it marks the beginning of a journey or the end; and when I reminded myself that I’d just flown several thousand miles, it was borne in upon me that my mother was going to be as dead here, now, as she had been in Chicago this morning.

Lovers and family members called to one another in the crowded lobby and embraced, and I was claimed by Ray, as he insisted on being called, the real-estate agent who had located a place for me in the town I’d chosen almost at random from a huge and uninformative guidebook. When I held out my hand to him, something like alarm flickered in his face. Had he expected some other sort of woman? No matter; I didn’t want to know. We had about an hour’s drive ahead of us, and I was determined to avoid the sort of intimate, confessional conversation that strangers are said to have. I had not gone into the circumstances of my trip in my letter or over the phone—I preferred to be considered simply a vacationer.

In the car I sat as far from Ray’s damp heartiness as possible, and I looked out the window while he talked. I’d never been far from Chicago, and I’d chosen to come to Latin America because of its unfamiliarity to my imagination. All the alluring places that during my mother’s lifetime I’d yearned to see belonged sealed now, I felt, in a completed past where they would remain contemporaneous with my mother.

The colors of the landscape that flowed around me were soft and dense, but the light itself was a rippling gold, and the clumps of trees and the sandy slopes and hollows seemed like moving islands tilting toward, then away from us in the fragile ocean of air. Eventually, we descended into a plateau ringed by mountains, and the disorienting glitter of the air melted in the low warmth, and soon distinguishable ahead of us against the tawny dryness was a tumble of feathery green and blossoms. Ray nodded. “Been a prime piece of real estate for something like a thousand years,” he said soberly.

We drove downward into a maze of cobbled streets bordered by high rosy walls, and we slowed to avoid a woman with several children who was crossing our path. On the woman’s head was a bundle—wrapped in plastic, I saw, as a pickup truck veered around us, raising a wake of brilliant dust. In the back of the truck was a crowd of men whose copper-colored faces and black hair shone above their work shirts. I glanced at the rather spongy person beside me. “Oh, you won’t be bored,” he said. “We have a wonderful group down here. Very fine people from all walks of life. Tennis, golf, sites of historical interest, pools. Perfect climate, of course—anything you want. To tell you the truth, we think we’re pretty clever. Not that we’d ever say so to our friends back home.” He smiled playfully, buoyed up for a moment by his own wit, and I turned away, mortified, as if I had seen something disastrously personal.

We parked high up on one side of the town. I followed Ray through a large wooden gate and was astonished to see the lush garden that lay beyond the wall, just off the dry, dusty street. “You’re upstairs over the garage,” Ray said, leading me through the garden and across a slate patio to a white house with a tiled roof. “But we have to get the keys from Norman.”

The front of the house was glass, and although the sun was too strong for me to see clearly into the unlit interior, I had the impression for an instant that a man, in something that looked like a bathrobe, hovered in back. “Mr. Egan. Mr. Egan,” Ray called, and as a woman came to the door the man I thought I’d seen became shadows. “Oh, hello, Dolores,” Ray said.

“Mr. Egan is not available,” the woman said, smiling at me. The words had a fresh, odd sound in her accent, as if their meaning were not quite set. “I will take you upstairs.”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you, Dolores,” Ray said. “Just let me have the keys and we’ll manage.”

Ray led me up a flight of whitewashed steps on the outside of the house to the door of what turned out to be a small apartment. “You needn’t worry much about tipping, by the way,” he said. “They don’t expect it. Just meals and that sort of thing. Well—kitchen, closet, bathroom. Oh, bed—well, obviously. Water’s generally potable, but you might boil to be on the safe side. We think it’s a nice little place. Norman’s wife used to use it as a sort of studio, I believe. I understand that she used to paint.” He paused, and something seemed to strike him. “Nice fellow, Norman. Of course, we can all use the extra income.”

“Is she still living?” I asked.

“Pardon me?” Ray said.

“Mr. Egan’s wife,” I said. “Did she die?”

“I see.” Ray nodded, as if I’d made some sort of point. “Not at all, not at all. Well, looks like Norman’s left you some provisions, but there are plenty of restaurants in town. Food’s quite safe as a rule. Have to watch out a bit for the men, of course, but nothing actually dangerous, I mean.” He held the keys out to me and then put them down on the table. “So,” he said, and looked at me, his arms at his sides.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sure everything will be fine.”

So he left, and I stood still to let the sound of his voice drain away into the heavy, bright, humming afternoon. Then I opened my suitcase and put my things in the closet and arranged my jars of lotions and creams on the bureau.

What to do? At work I would have been finishing for the day, organizing my files for the next morning. And soon, at the hospital, the patients would be receiving little paper cups holding pills, like the cups of candies at a children’s birthday party.

I went and sat on the small balcony that overlooked the garden. The air lapped against my skin with an unfamiliar silkiness, and scalloped rings of mountains surrounded me like ripples. Here and there, I could see softly rounded churches, with spires and crosses. My mother had been ill for so long that all time had flowed toward her death, and I feared that all time would flow backward to it as well. I had become thirty-four waiting for my own span to be placed over that fulcrum—an irrevocable placement.

Down below me a small white rabbit nosed out among the plants and zigzagged out of sight. Its pink eyes and the pink lining of its ears looked particularly sensitive to pain.

I noticed that my nice traveling skirt was already wrinkled and ingrained with dust, and a wave of sorrow engulfed me, as though I’d betrayed something placed in my care. This was only the strain, I understood, of the last weeks—the extra hours at the hospital, the extra hours at work to justify the time off I knew I would be taking, the funeral arrangements, the ordeal, especially, of sorting through my mother’s papers and disposing of all the little things my mother had acquired over the years for one purpose or another, now also dead.

How thorough my preparations had been! My mother herself, though, had been utterly unprepared. For close to twenty-five years her life had consisted of little more than the miseries of a slow degenerative illness, but as her future declined in value and her suffering increased, her fear increased also. She had feared death greatly, and life clung to her like a burning robe.

I thought with sudden fury of the doctor who stood with me in the hospital corridor only a few days ago. He had been unprepared as well, and he looked helpless, like a little boy all dressed up in a doctor suit. Yet he must have known for a long, long time that sooner or later he would have to face someone the way he faced me that day, and say those things.

That night my sleep was shallow and unpleasant, and when I woke I had the queasy sensation of having been brought up short, as when one steps from a boat onto fixed ground, and that was how I remembered that I was finished for good with trips to the hospital.

Just as it occurred to me that I would have to plunge into an unknown universe merely in order to obtain some coffee a man with a trim silver beard appeared at my door. “Good morning, good morning. I’m Norman, your evil landlord,” he said, holding out to me an armload of roses.

“Thank you,” I said. The flowers, still richly furled and heavy with droplets of water, were a living, modulated, faintly sickening salmon color.

“Vase under the sink,” Norman said. I judged him to be in his late fifties, and he would have been quite good-looking, I thought, except that his face seemed to have been stamped by a habit of geniality and then left unattended. Despite his jaunty white clothes, he seemed uncomfortable.

“My wife would have done a real arrangement for you,” he said. “She has quite a flair for it. Gardening, too.”

“Did Mrs. Egan do the garden here?” I asked. “Sandra,” he said. “Well, she doesn’t do too much now. We have the boy handle it.” Norman wandered over to the window and peered out, shading his eyes. “I suppose one gets tired of things.” I remained standing, anxious to get on with my day.

“It’s a shame,” Norman said, turning to me. “Used to be, when we first moved in here, you could see the mountain from this window every day of the year. Sacred, you know. Of course, this whole area was considered special—conquered over and over again by different tribes till the Spanish came and grabbed it up. Cities right on top of other cities down there. But—it’s fascinating—every one of those peoples used the same big pyramid up on the mountain to worship in their own way. Splendid ruins—Sandra and I used to take picnics…”

I squinted out the window. “Oh, you can’t see anything today.” Norman dismissed with a little wave the blue sky and dazzling sun. “All kinds of industry now mucking things up. People coming in from the country—crowding, pollution, that sort of thing.” He sighed. “Anyhow, nice to know you’ve got a view, eh? Whether you can see it or not. Well…” He put forth a mild, formalized version of a chuckle. “But we still love it. And, please—if you need anything, I hope you’ll ask. There are always so many little things one doesn’t quite know what to do about. One expects things to be one way, but then they turn out to be—not to be just exactly the way one expects.”

“Yes,” I said, from the depths of a sudden fatigue. “Perhaps you’d know where I might be able to buy some coffee.”

“Coffee,” he said. “Well—coffee. They’d have it in town, of course. Dolores handles that sort of thing for us. Oh, yes,” he said, misunderstanding my look of surprise, “we’re very lucky with Dolores. Down here we don’t like to be very,
very
formal”—he winked at me—“but Dolores came to us very young. Husband disappeared—you know the way they do—and Sandra taught her everything.”

“Really,” I said.

“Well, we were in the restaurant business, you see. We had lovely establishments. New Orleans, Dallas, Cincinnati, Fort Lauderdale—all over. And in every one of those places we had a wonderful, cultivated clientele. Sandra and I always personally oversaw everything. Oh,” he said. “I brought something else for you.” He handed me a little book. “This might prove useful. And remember, don’t feel shy. If you have questions, or you need something, you just come right downstairs and ask.”

“I don’t suppose I’ll be bothering you often,” I said, taking the opportunity to discourage further visits from him. “I’m really just here to—”

“Of course,” he said. “You’re young and adventurous. You didn’t come here to hang around with a couple of old—a couple of old…people.”

Young and adventurous, I thought irritably, as we went out together; young and adventurous. But as I closed the door behind us, I glanced back into the room, and I felt as if I’d been slapped. With the jars of cream out on the bureau, it was true that the place looked like a girl’s first apartment, like the apartments my college roommates had gotten for themselves when we graduated and I’d moved back in with my mother.

When I opened the front gate, the town I’d driven through only the day before took me by surprise, as if my imagination had perversely reconstructed a fleeting hallucination. The concave whorl of tangled streets lay below me in a glaze of sun, and I wound downward, baffled by the high walls. How quiet all the people around me were! They spoke in low voices, and averted their heavy-lashed eyes as I passed by. Even the children made hardly any noise. Trucks and motorcycles and an occasional flustered chicken provided all the sound.

At the base of the town, I found a small square, and although I was anxious to do a few errands and get my bearings, its lacy little white iron benches looked so ceremonial and expectant that I felt obliged to sit down for a moment. I chose a spot in the shade of a broad-leafed tree and surveyed the odd patch of a park around me. Paved walks threaded through it, and it was dotted with tiny tiled fountains. Heavy prismatic beams seemed to converge on it from many different suns, giving everything an exaggerated dimensionality in which it was impossible to judge distances, and in the very center was a band shell, confected from curls of iron and pearly glass, whose dome rose above the leaves of nearby trees. Around the edges of the square, people who looked like dolls in costumes, with black yarn hair, sold things: painted toys, hardware, bursting red fruits, clothing, hideous stuffed dogs, or masks—a fantastic, impossible catalogue of items. Aromas of ripe—overripe—fruit, and dust, and some kind of peppery cooking oil swirled lazily around me.

It was hot. I looked at my watch and was dismayed to find that it had stopped. What ought I to do? I thought, standing hurriedly. But I forced myself to sit back down and relax. I opened the little book that Norman had given me—a compilation of phrases in English and translation which the author seemed to consider indispensable to travelers: