The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (64 page)

One shrugged: They were widows.

Often now—whispers of special forces deployed in the desert. Sometimes one would hear faint, high tones in the night, like bullets striking rock—“Was that the phone?” Jean said.

“No,” Mark said.

“Ah,” Jean said.

“Yes.” He stood. “It’s late. I’ll leave you.” His soft voice floated next to her ear. “Thank you, Mrs. Soyer, you’ve been—”

“Jean,” she said. “Hardly.” She closed her eyes, and the room blazed again with desert light. Why hadn’t she gone up this morning? So long ago, that bright sun. The Tzotzil women would be dozing now, wrapped in lengths of red. Schacht, having a final tequila while he gazed out at the dark square. And up there—The suffocating imminence of drugged sleep? Rapid footsteps down the corridor? whatever was happening in that white bed, she would wake up here in the mornings, she would go to the shop. She would come home and eat the food Alicia had prepared, have a drink, look at the stars…It had seemed ridiculous, in all that sunlight, to think of going along. Ridiculous, and imprudent, as though panic itself were malignant. All yesterday he had done his little tasks around the house, around the yard. Even this morning—He’d looked up at her from his gardening, shading his eyes against the sun, with the trowel still wedged in the earth—

“So then.” That soft voice. “Next week.”

“Next week…” Jean repeated, but for moments she couldn’t think what the boy was talking about.

Rosie dips her brush into the dark-green paint and makes a careful little curve with it on the wall. She does it again, and then she does it again. Jamie was right—a monkey could do this.

When the green dries, Jamie will show her how to add another color, and, when that dries, another. And pretty soon, at the rate Jamie is painting, there will be three lush tiers, high around the room, of curling vines and flowers. Fruit, or some such shit, is going to go up there, too.

Morgan, the ridiculously handsome decorator, is out in the living room, discussing this,
the concept
, with Jamie, no doubt driving him nuts. Not for one second could even the dimmest person alive mistake Jamie’s attitude about the whole thing for enthusiasm. Poor Morgan.

The blue sky and water lie seamlessly just outside the window, across from Rosie’s little scaffold. Sometimes Rosie takes a moment to rest her mind and her aching arm, and lets herself float out there until the whir of time going by in the room recalls her to her task. It’s warm enough now so that a few little sails and wisps of cloud glide over the blue. When Rosie arrived in this city, it was winter, and the water and the sky looked like liquid metal.

This whole apartment is gleaming and slidey. You could be inside a bubble, here—a dark pearl, hanging in the middle of the sky. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: four mornings a week Lupe comes to clean and launder and put things in order. The floors have been bleached almost translucent, and stained, and a crew of other painters has done something to the walls to make them dark and glassy, so that Jamie’s leaves look like they’re twining right in the air. Every afternoon when Rosie and Jamie open the door on their way out, Rosie is shocked to see that they’re in an ordinary apartment building, where other people live—just ordinary people.

Almost thirty years old, Rosie thinks, and this is where she finds herself—on someone’s bedroom ceiling. Can it be true? But here’s the corroborating smell of the paints and mineral spirits, the feel of the brush against the hard surface, and, even more surprisingly, that little mark on the wall afterward: Rosie did this…

The people have moved in, although Jamie and Rosie still have the bedroom to do. The important thing was to have finished the smallish room—office, study, whatever—where the man frequently works, on a sleek assemblage of technology which Rosie watched arrive. The woman works in an office nearby, evidently, when she’s not traveling.

“Not to worry,” Morgan said to Rosie and Jamie. “They won’t get in your way.” He meant, obviously, that Rosie and Jamie had to figure out how not to get in
their
way. If he’d been talking to her, Rosie thinks, that’s pretty much how he would have put it. But, hey—he wasn’t talking to her.

Of course they’ll be pleased to see the last of Rosie and Jamie, these people. These people, obviously, like to keep things moving along. Already, pretty little objects have been placed out on tables and shelves, and a shining silk slip has been slung over a French screen in the bathroom—things like that. But framed pictures still lean against walls, and so do mirrors, which ambush Rosie with her own pale, fugitive presence.

Really, it would be just about impossible for anyone to get seriously in anyone else’s way here. The place is too large; the thick padding of money soaks up disturbance. The other day Rosie felt something behind her, and when she twirled around, Lupe was right there, working.

So Rosie has seen the maid, but she’s never seen the man or the woman who actually live in this place. Maybe they can’t be seen by ordinary eyes, is what Jamie says; maybe they’re just too special.

In the broad marshes between waking and sleep, where Rosie used to watch pictures fold and unfold like flowers, she is now plagued by visitors. Here’s a woman carrying a parcel from the German butcher shop around the corner. Blood has soaked through the waxed wrapping, staining the string that ties it. She models herself for Rosie: print dress; lumpy, shifting contours; resentful smile fading after some encounter. Several pretty hookers, one black, the others maybe Polish, totter about in platform shoes, on beautiful, spindly legs, laughing together, ruined, it looks like, every which way. A man in a hurry—good-looking, preoccupied, pleased with himself,
spoiled
, Rosie thinks—pulls up the collar of his expensive raincoat against the stinging drizzle.

The visitors assemble around Rosie and draw closer. When she sits up irritably, they scatter to the corners of the room, then draw back, flaunting themselves and their lives—their lives which are so particular and binding, as heavy as crowns and gold chains and royal robes. The weight falls across Rosie’s mouth and nose as she lies back down to sleep. She can hardly breathe.

People always say, you can’t run away. It’s one of those things Rosie’s heard a million times: whatever it is you’re running from, people say, you’re sure to bring it with you. But that’s not her problem, Rosie thinks—not at all. Unless what she always had was nothing.

When she came to this city and left what—at least, in her opinion—was quite a lot, back at Ian’s, there must have been something in her mind which made it possible for her to leave: she must have thought that while she (as it had suddenly come to appear) was taking time out the shuttle kept on moving back and forth; she must have thought that she could weave herself back into the web whenever she was ready; she must have thought it would be obvious what she was supposed to do next; she must have thought she’d just find herself doing whatever it was people did. Who knows what she was thinking? whatever it was, she was wrong.

Once in a while she resorts to the notion that Ian is back there wishing her well, in whatever manner he can. She
draws strength
from that, she thinks. Oh, well; shit.

No doubt he’d been incensed to find her gone. Still, she left all her effects—the pretty suède pouch containing her syringe, her silver spoon, her rubber tubing, everything—right there on the pillow, so he’d see right away, and he’d know, more or less, just what she’d be going through. Better than leaving a note, Rosie thought—she just didn’t know what more to say.

From time to time she regrets not having told Ian she was leaving. But what was the point? She was leaving. And Ian would have said no, stay, he’d help her to stop; hadn’t he always told her to stop? Just what she needed, Rosie thinks—Ian in charge of her free will.

It’s not Ian’s way to lie, but Rosie has to wonder what he really wanted from her. All that talk about his clients—their weakness, their needs, the things they pretended to themselves. But the whole point, Rosie thinks, is that, high, she was as strong as wire, she needed nothing, and she never had to pretend a thing. All that talk about Rosie abusing her body (with not a word, of course, about what her body was doing to her!), but how did Ian think he’d met her, if not selling her and Cathy what they’d started snorting during lunch hour, years ago? The truth is, Ian could afford to say anything at all that made him feel righteous: it seemed he could count on her not to stop.

Another one of those things that Rosie’s heard for years and years is people asking other people,
Why did you start taking drugs?
You turn on the
tele
vision and you hear that. But this is not a real question; it’s just a sticky, juicy treat. Pornography. The shining faces, the eager and self-congratulatory answers—everyone feels great, everyone’s rubbing it in their hair. My mother, my father, whatever—not real answers, but the question’s not a real question.
Why did you start taking drugs?
Not a real question. Here, the real question:
Why didn’t you, dear?
No. The real question:
Why did you stop?

Not long before Rosie left, Ian took her on a call to some clients. There was an architect, and a man who owned a restaurant that the architect had designed, and their wives. It was an occasion, a birthday party, of sorts. Ian, as usual, wore his English hat with his initials stamped in gold on the inside band, and he carried his good briefcase. Very impressive, no doubt, to the hopheads stumbling around River Street, but the architect and the restaurateur were wearing suits obviously woven of fibers plucked for them personally from some rare beast. One of the wives wore a suit as well, a tiny little black thing, and the other wife wore a tiny little black dress. The house, which the architect had designed, was glaringly white. Almost the only color in it, aside from the soft green of Rosie’s longish, graceful dress, was a huge crystal vase of roses, dark, dark red, like a blackening heart.

Ian had been called in to supply the birthday present—for the architect, as Rosie remembers, though all four of those people were pretty jacked up, controlled and furtively absent, like kids who have planned to sneak out and have sex.

The whole thing is even worse to remember than it was when it was happening. Ian and his
database
; earlier that evening he’d called the architect and the restaurateur up on the screen to make Rosie look. Lists of accomplishments vibrated in the synthetic blue depths. “Prominent people,” Ian had said.

The lowered eyes, the swinishly clean whiteness, the hair like sculpture—Rosie practically gags, thinking of it. Never has she heard the words “my wife” used so often in so short a time. At moments the two couples had behaved as though Ian and Rosie weren’t there; at other moments they were terribly, terribly polite—as if Ian and Rosie were the stableboys, called away from rolling in manure to come into the house for, say, a Christmas eggnog. What a waste of good drugs.

Ian had hustled Rosie along. They were just going to drop by on this thing, he’d said; they’d be home in good time, he meant, before she got uncomfortable. But then he was talking and talking. He knew about everything, of course. He knew about the new restaurant and other buildings the architect had designed, the wine they were all drinking, the variety of rose in the big crystal vase. Naturally he knew about the house—building techniques, materials…pretty much whatever could be known.

Rosie could perfectly well have excused herself and emerged decorously from the bathroom in mere minutes, in a much more accommodating frame of mind—she’d tucked her pouch prudently in her purse—but Ian would have gone absolutely nuts.

The little thorns of his voice caught and caught at her. She made herself get up, cross the room, and examine the bookshelves. In all those shelves there were about ten books—the tall kind, with pictures. She opened one: photograph after photograph showed a nude girl strapped down, with medical equipment inserted into her. Rosie closed her eyes, as if to bring the ocean, and a whooshing sound came up around her. Cars, obviously, going and going outside on the highway. When she turned around again, Ian was nowhere to be seen.

She found him standing in the long sweep of the kitchen. His briefcase was open and his scales were out on the table. The wife in the suit was there, too, counting out money, slowly and carefully, her head tilted down as she watched the bills leave her hands. Her thick lashes were very dark against her skin, and her smooth hair was pouring slowly forward. Ian leaned against the refrigerator, not touching the money, of course, or even looking at it. “I have to get back,” Rosie said. Ian glanced at her, and his glance held. “Right,” he said. “With you in a sec.”

The others seemed not to have moved while Rosie was out of the room. The air was fantastically still. “It’s going to storm,” she said, but none of the others responded. Perhaps she hadn’t actually spoken.

“Where’s Ashley?” one of the men said. “Out in the kitchen,” the other man said.

“With the Connoisseur. Your competition.” And they made that little pause that stands for a laugh.

On the way home, Ian was calm, and happy, telling Rosie about a building in Seattle that the architect had designed. Yes, Rosie kept saying; that’s great, yes. It was like listening to the happy stories of a child who doesn’t yet know his home has been destroyed in a fire.

How could he have been such an idiot? And those people! How pleased they were with themselves—with all their things, with all their accomplishments.
My wife, my wife
…So pleased to have used their time so well. Those people had treated their lives so well, tending them and worshipping them and
using
them (however moronically), and she had just tossed hers into the freezer, like some old chunk of something you didn’t exactly know what to do with. But why should her life be more despised than theirs?

Yeah, you’ve got to
play your cards right
with time, Rosie thinks. It’s not merely the thing that kills you; evidently it’s also the thing that keeps you alive. You can inoculate yourself against it, you can rid yourself of it, but then where are you? Not dead, true, but not alive, either; you’ve got rid of the thing inside you that pulls you along toward the end of the line, but don’t you want to go anywhere? Because if you want to go somewhere, the end of the line is the only available destination.

The trees by the side of the road had begun to rustle anxiously, and a peal of thunder tore open the sky, exposing a jagged edge of lightning. When the sky went black again, it was as if a fissure in the earth had been revealed.

On one side of the chasm was the house with the architect and the restaurateur and their wives, and Rosie’s school friends, and the others in her office, and stadiums full of people, and the students traveling in packs through Europe—all the people in the world, in fact, studying and working and playing sports and having colds and running errands and doing whatever it is humans do. And on the other was Rosie, sitting in her little bathroom, cleaning her syringe. All those people rushing around, but they can’t touch Rosie. Their awful thoughts and desires, their disdain, their demands—nothing coming from them can stain or damage Rosie; she never changes, never gets older, just dries out into nothing as she cleans her syringe in a glass of pure spring water.