The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (35 page)

“I know, baby,” Roo said. “That’s why you’ve got to be patient with him.” But Joshua shook her hand from his shoulder, sighed again, and scuffed his way loudly to the screen door, which he allowed to slam behind him.

“I don’t know what
that’s
all about,” Jill said, burning. “He adores James. He’s always asking for James.”

Altogether it was a relief when the doorbell rang. Owen and Kitsy were the first to arrive, and when Jill opened the door, Owen was already in the middle of a bow. “Goodness me—” he said. His voice was a graphitelike emollient, a granular medium in which the words spread out soothingly.

Jill laughed and kissed him. How innocent he made the world seem; he was so completely himself, rueful and mysterious, precariously balanced, like an underwater explorer. Behind thick, gogglelike glasses, his eyes swam in unstable magnification.

“Mosquito,” Kitsy said, slapping.

“Uh-oh,” Nick said. He put an arm around Kitsy and gave Owen a pleased, telegraphic nod. “Let’s run for cover.”

“Let us,” Owen said, wandering inside. “Possibly the shelter of the bar…”

“What to drink?” Jill asked.

“They’ve got me on Scotch tonight,” Owen said vaguely.

“Gin-tonic, please, darlin’,” Kitsy said. “A healthy one. I’ve been doing battle with the tomatoes all day.” Kitsy smoothed back her oat-colored hair as her attention traveled across the room, randomly encountering and dismissing objects. “I don’t know how you do it all,” she said. “And with a job. Jobs, tomatoes, Joshua…” Could it be true, Jill wondered, about Kitsy and Bud? Kitsy was so…like a parakeet on a perch—blinking and rounded over her prim little feet. But when the doorbell rang, Kitsy didn’t move, though her eyes brightened and narrowed.

Bud and Amanda and Susan and Lyle arrived in a clump and were reabsorbed, after some initial milling, into configurations that left Jill with Bud and Susan. Bud looked controlled, Jill saw—possibly furious, and when, in another part of the room, Amanda laughed, he closed his eyes almost blissfully for an instant, before turning his attention, with surplus force, to Susan. “So where do you get all these wonderful garments, Susan?” he said, tugging at a tassel on the large shawl she wore.

“Oh—” Susan waved her hand and laughed, but Bud waited unyieldingly with a half-smile and lifted eyebrows. “All right,” Susan said. She cleared her throat. “Well, this particular one’s from Mexico. And it is lovely, thank you, Bud, isn’t it?” She turned to Jill, and her large eyes looked lost, and metallic. “You know, when Lyle and I were back in March, we didn’t see anything of this caliber. Hardly any cotton at all, in fact. Isn’t that odd? It was my understanding that they grew it.”

“Cash crop,” Bud said. “Grow it for export.”

“Oh, yes,” Susan said dubiously. “Well, that doesn’t sound so good, does it?”

Clearly Bud was beginning to enjoy himself now, Jill saw, that Susan was flustered. Really, he was rather attractive with that little space between his teeth and his raffish, dark halo of receding hair. “Hear you’ve been having the worst kind of trouble with that painter you and Lyle have in your beach house,” he said.

“Gracious, this
drink
,” Susan said. “Naughty Jill.” But Bud only looked down at his glass and swirled the ice patiently, so Susan, patting at a fan-shaped ornament that was struggling upward from her heavy hair, sighed and continued. “I’m afraid it did turn into a bit of a melee,” she said.

“What a shame,” Bud said. “But very generous of you and Lyle.”

“Well, the man’s an enormous talent,” Susan said. To her astonishment, Jill saw Kitsy direct a damp, shining glance in their direction, but Bud shifted slightly, so that his back was squarely to her. “And the dreadful truth is that Lyle and I hardly ever use the place. So we thought, now isn’t it criminal to waste it like this when there must be—oh, well…” She laughed self-deprecatingly.

“Not a bad way to pick up a bargain,” Bud said. He laughed along with her, then made an elaborate display of sobering. “Oh, Bud, how vulgar,” he said in falsetto.

“Not that Lyle and I minded for ourselves,” Susan said, reddening. “But the Foleys found trash all over their beach. And they actually had to call the police about the noise…” Bud clucked sympathetically.

Susan, having gained momentum, was now irrepressibly confidential. “We did manage to get him out finally,” she said. “But there was quite a scene. He
pointed
his finger, and accused Lyle of ‘artistic imperialism’ if you can believe it.”

“Artistic imperialism—” Jill laughed. “My!”

“Yes—” Lyle said, joining them. Towering over Bud, Lyle rocked mournfully back and forth on his toes, and pushed his floppy hair behind his ear in discomfiture. “It really was funny.” Jill smiled at his baffled sorrow and put an affectionate hand on his arm. He was like a gigantic boy, with those glasses and that pink, open mouth.

“Mrs. Douglas—” Roo said. She stood just behind the entrance to the living room, holding James.

“Yes, Roo,” Jill said. Roo had changed into very high heels and a white dress that Jill had kept in the closet for two years after Joshua was born, before coming to terms with the probability that she would never fit into it again. “Come in.”

“I’m just saying the taxi’s come,” Roo said.

“Oh. Well, thank you, Roo.” But she’d never—she’d never seen Roo actually wearing the dress. “Good night, then.”

“Oh, Roo,” Kitsy called. “Don’t you look stunning.” And there was a silence as Roo turned slightly to readjust James, exposing the fine articulation of her arms, and her narrow bare back. Where could she be going like that, Jill wondered. And with James—

“Hello, James,” Amanda said, raising her glass slightly.

“And will I see you on Tuesday, then, Roo?” Jill asked senselessly.

“Yes, Mrs. Douglas,” Roo said, her face scrupulously expressionless.

Jill sighed. If only there were still people in the world like the people who had worked for her parents—people made flexible and melodious by their hard lives; special, quiet people with gentle hands and outlandish, old-fashioned names. Jill remembered one woman in particular, Evaline, and her husband, Vernon, who had helped occasionally in the yard. Jill hadn’t thought about them in years, she realized with surprise. How she had adored them! But then once—sometime, she did not remember when, sometime when she was a child—her mother had told her something: a story about a past that Vernon and Evaline had in common, things that had happened before they’d met, even before they’d been born.

And the story was (Jill’s mother had been doing her nails, Jill remembered, when Jill had gotten her to tell it) that Vernon and Evaline each had a grandparent, or grandparents, who had been slaves, whose own parents had been taken to America—kidnapped away from their families, bound up in chains, and put on boats with other prisoners whose language they could not understand. And then they had been brought to America and sold.

Jill stood very still. She felt as though she knew what her mother was telling her, but did not know, at the same time, and she wanted her mother to tell her again, but for some reason she did not dare to say so. “‘Sold’?” she repeated very, very quietly.

“That’s what I said, Jill.” Her mother spread out her fingers and stared at her nails with a sorrowful, absent irony.

So, they’d been sold. And bought—just like the little lizard Jill’s father had bought at the circus for her. “But you must never, never mention this to them,” her mother said. “They would be terribly hurt.”

Jill’s throat was dry, and her skin prickled oddly. “Why, Mother?” she said.

“Because,” her mother said. Then she looked at Jill, as though Jill had just come into the room, and stood up. “Because, Jill, it was their own people who did that to them.” And after that, Jill had felt very shy with Vernon and Evaline.

“How she does it,” Kitsy said, when the door closed behind Roo. “And that adorable little boy.”

“You send her home in a taxi?” Bud said.

Jill laughed, and the memory of Evaline and Vernon and her mother dispersed. “Do you think we’re rich like you? Just to the station.”

“I was going to
say
,” Bud said.

“I suppose she has to go all the way to the far side of the city,” Kitsy said. “What a saint that girl is—but, oh, that dreadful brother!”

“The Utterly Worthless Dwayne,” Nick said.

“Not utterly,” Amanda said, and sat down. “Roo adores him.” She crossed her legs and surveyed the little gold sandal dangling from her high-arched foot. “He practically brought her up, you know.”

“Be that as it may”—Kitsy addressed Amanda’s shoe—“things are otherwise now.”

“Mmm,” Amanda said. And in the pause Kitsy’s comment flopped about like a stranded fish. “Incidentally,” Amanda added, “he’s doing something creative about his problem, finally.”

“You don’t mean to say he’s hocked his needles?” Nick said, and Bud laughed shortly.

“How ashamed you’ll be, Nicholas,” Amanda said, “when I tell you that he’s joined a drug-rehabilitation program in St. Louis.”

“A drug-rehabilitation program—” Jill frowned. “Are you sure? That’s not what Roo—”

“Of course I’m sure.” Amanda raised her eyebrows slightly. “I helped him get into it.”

“Quite a triumph, Amanda,” Nick said. “But it could be short-lived.”

Amanda smiled faintly, but Jill was distressed: It was part of Nick’s charm that he was contrary, absolutely intolerant of hypocrisy. But therefore—because he considered Amanda’s activities to be merely adornments that issued from vanity rather than conviction—Amanda could provoke him into assuming and defending truly unattractive postures.

“After all,” Nick said, “this is your little project, not his, isn’t it, Amanda. A man like Dwayne is almost certain to drop out. Just look at the statistics.”

“Nick,” Jill said.

“He’ll tear through a wad of state money,” Nick said. “Or Bud’s money, if that’s what it is, and then he’ll drop out, and we’ll all be back where we started, except that his self-esteem, and Roo’s hopes, will be shattered.”

“I’m sorry to admit,” Kitsy said, “that I think Nicholas has a point.”

“Oh, my—” Owen’s voice spread into the room. “Look at this tray, all undefended and just littered with shrimp.”

“These
are
delicious, Jill,” Lyle said. “Anyone else? Kitsy? Amanda? Bud?”

“No, thanks,” Bud said. “So how’s life in the futures, Lyle?”

“What?” Lyle said. He looked up, his mouth open. “Oh, picking up, Bud, thanks.”

“The thing is, Amanda”—Nick leaned back in his chair—“you’re not doing anybody a favor. Dwayne is just pulling your strings.”

Amanda made a little face at Nick and pushed her gleaming bracelets up her arms. “You do have to agree,” she said, “that Dwayne would have had a very different life if it hadn’t been for the war.”

“Isn’t it strange, Amanda,” Nick said, “how everyone would have had a different life if it hadn’t been for everything? Certainly I agree that men like Dwayne had a very hard time. Yes, it was easier for white kids to avoid the draft; yes, the men who did end up fighting were treated pretty badly—and by people who never had to confront the issue of what they themselves would have done if they’d been drafted. But you’ve got to remember, Amanda, that it’s possible to have any number of responses to a problem, and I think that
you’ll
agree with
me
: no one
has
to take drugs, and no one
has
to become a criminal. Now, I was as opposed to that war as anybody in this room. But in hindsight, we see—whether we like it or not—that, once there, we should have stayed there. Look what happened the minute we left. But here are Dwayne and his friends, behaving as if they’re the only people in the world who ever had a difficult time. ‘Oh, us poor black veterans—sacrificed to do the dirty work of the U.S. government…’ Well, of course I’m sympathetic to their situation—it’s unfortunate; no one would deny it, but the truth is that this position of theirs is untenable. And it’s disingenuous. Because, in point of fact, it was those very men who stood to
gain
from being in the army. They picked up some valuable skills, they picked up a free education—”

For a moment Amanda’s face was white, but then she laughed and shook back her hair. “You’re really quite a Nazi, you know, Nick,” she said.

“And don’t you forget it, Fräulein,” Nick said, smiling at her slowly.

“Frau, to you.” Amanda smiled slowly back.

“Jill—” Owen glided in front of her, severing her attention from—from what? Jill felt a gust of irritation. “Now I have a serious question for you,” he said.

Nick got out of his chair and walked to the window. He stared out, in the direction of the Binghams’.

“And that question,” Owen said, “is this. Does Joshua plan to put in an appearance before dinner, or must I hunt him down?”

“I’m afraid I told him he had to stay upstairs,” Jill said. “He was a horror this afternoon.”

“Not Joshua,” Kitsy said. “It’s not possible.”

“Alas, it is.” Jill stopped for a moment, overcome. “In fact—well, as a matter of fact he was gruesome to poor little James. And absolutely rude to Roo.”

“Roo-too-roo,” Lyle said. “Roo-too-roo—”

“What are you saying, Jill?” Nick said, turning from the window as Lyle tossed a shrimp in the air and caught it in his very pink mouth.

“The truth is,” Jill said, “I think Joshua sometimes resents sharing Roo.” She didn’t dare look at Nick. “And Katrina.”

“He knows how to share,” Nick said. “I’ve seen him share very generously with his friends.”

“It must be hard for him in his own house, though,” Kitsy said.

“Certainly,” Bud said. “I know I wouldn’t share Katrina with anyone.”

“No one imagines you would, Bud,” Amanda said, as Kitsy erupted in a volley of tiny coughs.

“Excuse me,” she gasped. “Swallowed.”

“This is something I don’t enjoy hearing, Jill,” Nick said.