The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (26 page)

“Oh, my, Patty,” George said one night. A slightly soiled gentility permeated his soft speech, and his elegant face changed constantly under fleeting shadows of emotion. He was certainly from America, but from what part or circumstances Patty was unable to guess. Even George’s age Patty couldn’t pin down to the decade. “All this standing around must be very tiresome for you.”

“It is, really,” she admitted.

“
I
know.” George brightened. “Why don’t we play a game?”

“All right,” she said.

“That’s the spirit.” George beamed expectantly. “Shall we play ‘What Famous Monarch’?”

“O.K.,” Patty said. “How do you play?”

“Ah,” George said. “Well, for instance, I think of a certain famous monarch, and I think of something about that monarch, and then I say to you, ‘What famous monarch blah-blah?,’ for example, or ‘What famous monarch blah-blah?’”

“Maybe you’d better go first,” Patty said.

“Very well.” George gathered himself into thought. “What famous monarch…” he said meditatively, “preferred being under a horse to being on one?”

Under a horse…under a horse…Patty ransacked her crated-up years of education. “Oh, George,” she said with disgust. “Not Catherine the Great!”

“Well, that was an easy one,” George said primly. “Just to show you how to play.

“Your turn,” George said later, as Patty cleared his plate and wiped his table, scattering crumbs all over his trousers.

“Well…” Patty said. Besides, she didn’t know anything
about
history. She didn’t know anything
about
monarchs. Ah! (Hee-hee.) “O.K., what famous monarch is ahead of the times in a German museum?”

“Ahead of the times…” George looked pained. “Hmm.

“Well, I give up, Patty,” he said some minutes later. “That’s a toughie.”

“Nefertiti!” she announced.

“What?” George said. “But Patty—that doesn’t make any
sense
, dear. I mean—well, a
head
, after all. That is, naturally I could have mentioned any number of royal portraits. But ‘ahead’ of the
times
—I mean,
whose
times, exactly? Do you see? You see, it’s a pun, dear, but it doesn’t make any
sense.
”

Patty slunk around cleaning tables and consolidating bottles of ketchup until George’s good humor reasserted itself. “Speaking of ahead,” he said, “what famous monarch became a head of a church because of a child?”

“Mary?” Patty ventured unhappily.

“Mary?” George said. “Which Mary? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Well…the Virgin Mary?”

“Gracious, Patty, I really don’t think you could call the Virgin Mary a
monarch.
Or the head of a church, exactly. I was referring to Henry VIII, of course.”

“O.K.,” she said. “So then what famous monarch lost her head over a child?”

“Anne Boleyn,” George replied, giving Patty’s hand a consolatory little squeeze.

Arnold’s business eventually began to pick up, and Patty felt that she could repay some of Stuart’s generosity. He was beginning to look a bit mangy, in fact, so she took to inviting him over for breakfast before she left for work in the evenings. Besides (she had to be honest), she was a terrible cook, and Stuart actually enjoyed cooking.

“Guess what,” Stuart announced one night as he broke eggs into one of Patty’s bowls. “Rand fired me today.”

“What?” Patty said. Rand published a small magazine, for which Stuart wrote about film. “I thought you and Rand were buddies. Doesn’t he take you out drinking with him?”

“Yeah,” Stuart said. “He’s really upset about this, but apparently he and his wife had a big fight.”

“So I don’t get it,” Patty said. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“Well, I was trying to do him a favor,” Stuart said. “I feel so sorry for him. His wife’s absolutely nauseating, you know—and one thing is, she likes to have these parties to show off people she’s met to people she’s met, and she makes Rand bring someone from the staff each time. So last month I was the sacrifice. And she grabs me, and she’s telling me that Devereaux is ‘a genius,’ ‘the only American auteur,’ and what do I think of him. And I try to be noncommittal, because I don’t want to be forced to say, ‘But lady, he’s just one more crypto-fascist Hollywood cowboy.’ So she tells me I’ve got to write about him. She’s
met
him. He’s ‘a remarkable man.’ So ‘penetrating.’ And then she turns that cash-register face to me and she says, ‘He doesn’t suffer fools gladly.’ Well, that’s something that gets to me, Patty. It just does. When someone looks at you like that and says, ‘He doesn’t suffer fools gladly,’ what they mean is ‘He doesn’t suffer fools
like you
gladly,’ or maybe only ‘He doesn’t,
like you
, suffer fools gladly,’ but in any case it’s definitely a challenge, don’t you agree? Still, to be accommodating, I go to this screening of
Pulsepoint
, only it seems like Devereaux
does
suffer fools gladly. In fact, it seems like fools are Devereaux’s favorite thing. So that’s kind of what I wrote my piece about.”

“Good going, Stuart.” Patty sighed.

“And she sort of took it out on Rand, because I guess she’d planned this big party especially to invite Devereaux. Poor Rand. Here, I think this is done.”

Patty was just about to start in on the plate of fragrant French toast Stuart had put in front of her when a small commotion erupted in the hallway. Stuart opened the door to inspect, and Patty, hovering behind him, saw Mrs. Jorgenson sprawled out in front of the mailboxes while a well-dressed man and woman bickered in undignified descant over her stately snores.

“Phyllis,” the man was saying, “I really don’t think this person ought to be lying here like this.”

“We’re going to be late,” the woman said. “Why do you always have to be Mr. Nice Guy?”

“She wants a blanket,” Patty said thickly from behind Stuart, and two sets of icy blue eyes stared up at her.

Mr. Nice Guy went upstairs to get a blanket, and Patty realized that he and the woman (who now stood next to her in uncomfortable silence) must be the art dealers who had recently moved into the apartment above Marcia’s. Mr. Martinez, in whose view their arrival represented an influx of undesirables, had informed Patty that the couple had taken the apartment—small and shabby as it was—in anticipation of a move to co-op. “Now you will see,” Mr. Martinez had predicted grimly, “they make takeover.” And certainly the first sounds of renovation were already militating against Patty’s daytime sleep.

For an instant Mrs. Jorgenson stopped snoring and opened her eyes, exposing a malevolent but impersonal irony—the expression of a tough old animal in a sprung trap. “Bugger,” she said obliquely. As she resumed her snoring, Mr. Nice Guy returned, bearing a blanket, which he draped ineptly over her while his wife fidgeted with distaste.

Patty and Stuart went back to their breakfast, but the inky cold pressing in at the window had contracted the apartment; the chairs and table felt cramped and brittle.

“As you said, Patty.” Stuart nodded morosely at his French toast. “Everything changes. It’s not a tragedy.”

Patty looked at Stuart closely. “Your apartment
is
rent-stabilized, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Of course, I’m due for an increase in November. But it is rent-stabilized.”

“You’re due for an increase? In November?”

“It hardly matters,” he said. “I’m a couple months behind anyhow.”

“You’re
behind
?” Patty put down her fork.

“Well, Marty intercedes for me with Mr. Feltzer.”

“But that can’t go on forever, Stuart.” Stuart was just
sitting
there, watching the butter and syrup congeal on his French toast. “Stuart!”

“I know. It’s my own fault. You don’t have to tell me, Patty. I ought to have done things differently.”

“Now, just relax, Stuart. Let’s think this out. There must be something—I mean, you can always—”

“See, Patty? I’ve made my own bed here. No one owes me a thing.”

“But you could always…” What
could
he do, Patty thought. There would be no point in his looking for a cheaper apartment—people had to scheme and connive for apartments ten times the price of Stuart’s. “Well, you could just for a while…”

“No, Patty,” Stuart said, hollow-eyed. “You want your own life. You don’t need me around.”

“But actually, Stuart—” Oh, why
her
? Why
her
? “Actually, I think you’d better.”

So Stuart set up his little bed in Marcia’s kitchen and fitted his belongings in among Patty’s. At first Patty felt as if she were in the eye of some oddly dissipating hurricane. Stuart was jumpy and he hankered after physical activity, but he was also frail and cursed with notably poor coordination. He would leave eagerly for a little run or to shoot baskets with the towering boys who hung around the lot on the corner, only to return almost immediately, fretful, winded, and streaming with sweat. It was Patty who opened stubborn jars, while Stuart, in an unbecoming agony of humiliation, shook out his cramping hand.

Still, he was clean and tidy, although one wouldn’t have guessed it to look at him, and he good-naturedly performed the household chores, at which Patty was useless anyhow. The standard of Patty’s meals rose, while their cost fell, and for a while Stuart had a run of luck with part-time jobs—he worked happily for a small press until it went out of business, and he received several checks when some of his writing was performed as “soundscapes” at a club, before he told the owners they were pretentious—so he was able to manage his share of the rent.

When Patty returned from work in the mornings, Stuart would wake up long enough to read her to sleep. If it had been an ordinary night at work, he would pick up whatever he himself was reading, and Patty would soon be bored into somnolence. But if it had been a busy night and Patty was wide awake, Stuart would read old, strange, majestic tales of princes turned into swans; swans believed to be second-rate ducklings; suitors who would be magically invested with insight that enabled them to choose the correct path, door, direction, or answer; nearly blameless girls imprisoned within evil trances; and soldiers or poor boys whose wits were to secure them brilliant futures. And as Stuart read, Patty would glide into sun-dappled dream forests where she encountered these creatures, known so well to her, though they were hidden temporarily, in their false conditions, from themselves.

But the in dependent unit created by two people is an unstable compound, a murky bog in which wayward growths flourish, and it was not long before Stuart decided that he and Patty ought to be sleeping together, a view he began to express (as Patty experienced it) with mosquito-like persistence.

“No,” Patty said.

“Why not?” Stuart said.

“Because.” Where were all those marvelous
men
she’d been promised by herself? Why did she have to discuss this with
Stuart
?

“So why because?”

Patty fixed him with a look intended to fracture his cheery insensitivity. “Because I’m not attracted to you, Stuart.”

“You would become attracted to me if you were to sleep with me,” he argued affably.

“But I’m not going to sleep with you,” she said.

“Don’t you see the beauty of it, Patty? It’s sound in every way—politically, economically, aesthetically. You and I would be an entire ecol ogy, generating and utilizing our own energies.”

“I’m not here to…to provide physiological release for you,” she said.

“Why not? I’m here to provide it for you. Listen, you’re going to start suffering from pelvic distress one of these days. There could even be colonic or arterial consequences, you know.”

It wasn’t fair, Patty thought—Stuart obviously felt entitled to win every argument just because he knew more words than she did. She could only repeat herself stubbornly while he continued to whine and orate, disguising his little project in various rationales, until it seemed that one wolf, in different silly bonnets, was peeping out at her from behind a circle of trees.

“All right,” she said to Stuart one night. It was miserably cold outside, but she was off work, and she just couldn’t face the harangue that would flow unobstructed if she stayed in the apartment with Stuart. “All right. I’ve had it. This is it. Out.”

“What?” Stuart said, having been halted in midsentence. “Out.” She reached for one of her own suitcases and started loading it with Stuart’s neatly folded clothing.

“What are you doing?” he said, aghast.

“Out. Now. Out, out.” She picked up the suitcase in one hand and shooed Stuart to the door with the other. “This is enough to get by on for a while. Let me know where you are and I’ll send the rest on to you.”

“You know,” Stuart said as he trotted down the hall in front of her, “Marcia kept saying ‘Oh, Patty is so
centered.
Patty is such a
woman
,’ but actually, Patty, you’re a very nervous person.”

On the street Patty flagged down a taxi. “Take this guy to Port Authority,” she said, giving the driver a ten. She shoved Stuart into the back seat next to his suitcase and ran along behind the taxi as it took off, flapping her skirt.

As she walked back down the hall, whimpering, Mr. Martinez peered out from his doorway. “The mens—the mens—” he said, his voice vibrant with commiseration. “They must do this thing. Do not cry, missy. He will come back.”

But, back inside the apartment, Patty did cry. She cried and cried, from exhaustion, rage, loneliness, remorse, and relief. And when she’d finished she walked slowly to the phone and dialed the number Marcia had given her.

“Hello, Marcia,” she said stonily. Patty was not sure why she had called, but she knew, with a weariness that must accompany the end of a lengthy and sordid police investigation, that it was necessary. “How are you?”