The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (84 page)

And always in front of you now was the sight that had been hidden by the curtain, of all those irrepressibly, murderously angry people.

Private life shrank to nothing. All one’s feelings had been absorbed by an arid wasteland—policy, strategy, goals. One’s past, one’s future, one’s ordinary daily pleasures were like dusty little curios on a shelf.

Lucien continued defiantly throwing his parties, but as the murky wars dragged on, he stopped. It was impossible to have fun or to want to have fun. It was one thing to have fun if the sun was shining generally, quite another thing to have fun if it was raining blood everywhere but on your party. What did he and his friends really have in common, anyway? Maybe nothing more than their level of privilege.

In restaurants and cafes all over the city, people seemed to have changed. The good-hearted, casually wasteful festival was over. In some places the diners were sullen and dogged, as if they felt accused of getting away with something.

In other places, the gaiety was cranked up to the level of completely unconvincing hysteria. For a long miserable while, in fact, the city looked like a school play about war profiteering. The bars were overflowing with very young people from heaven only knew where, in hideous, ludicrously showy clothing, spending massive amounts of money on green, pink, and orange cocktails, and laughing at the top of their lungs, as if at filthy jokes.

No, not like a school play—like a movie, though the performances and the direction were crude. The loud, ostensibly carefree young people appeared to be extras recruited from the suburbs, and yet sometime in the distant future, people seeing such a movie might think oh, yes, that was a New York that existed once, say, at the end of the millennium.

It was Lucien’s city, Lucien’s times, and yet what he appeared to be living in wasn’t the actual present—it was an inaccurate representation of the
past
. True, it looked something like the New York that existed before
all this
began, but Lucien remembered, and he could see: the costumes were not quite right, the hairstyles were not quite right, the gestures and the dialogue were not quite right.

Oh. Yes. Of course none of it was quite right—the movie was a
propaganda
movie. And now it seems that the propaganda movie has done its job; things, in a grotesque sense, are back to normal.

Money is flowing a bit again, most of the flags have folded up, those nerve-wracking terror alerts have all but stopped, the kids in the restaurants have calmed down, no more rolling blackouts, and the dogs on the street encode no particular messages. Once again, people are concerned with getting on with their lives. Once again, the curtain has dropped.

Except that people seem a little bit nervous, a little uncomfortable, a little wary. Because you can’t help sort of knowing that what you’re seeing is only the curtain. And you can’t help guessing what might be going on behind it.

The Further in the Past Things are, the Bigger They Become

Nathaniel remembers more and more rather than less and less vividly the visit of his uncle and aunt to the Midwest during his childhood.

He’d thought his aunt Charlie was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And for all he knows, she really was. He never saw her after that one visit; by the time he came to New York and reconnected with Uncle Lucien she had been dead for a long time. She would still have been under fifty when she died—crushed, his mother had once, in a mood, implied, by the weight of her own pretensions.

His poor mother! She had cooked, cleaned, and fretted for…months, it had seemed, in preparation for that visit of Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie. And observing in his memory the four grown-ups, Nathaniel can see an awful lot of white knuckles.

He remembers his mother picking up a book Aunt Charlie had left lying on the kitchen table, glancing at it and putting it back down with a tiny shrug and a lifted eyebrow. “You don’t approve?” Aunt Charlie said, and Nathaniel is shocked to see, in his memory, that she is tense.

His mother, having gained the advantage, makes another bitter little shrug. “I’m sure it’s over my head,” she says.

When the term of the visit came to an end, they dropped Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie at the airport. His brother was driving, too fast. Nathaniel can hear himself announcing in his child’s piercing voice, “
I want to live in New York like Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie!
” His exile’s heart was brimming, but it was clear from his mother’s profile that she was braced for an execution.

“Slow
down
, Bernie!” his mother said, but Bernie hadn’t. “Big shot,” she muttered, though it was unclear at whom this was directed—whether at his brother or himself or his father, or his Uncle Lucien, or at Aunt Charlie herself.

Back to Normal

Do dogs have to fight sadness as tirelessly as humans do? They seem less involved with retrospect, less involved in dread and anticipation. Animals other than humans appear to be having a more profound experience of the present. But who’s to say? Clearly their feelings are intense, and maybe grief and anxiety darken all their days. Maybe that’s why they’ve acquired their stripes and polka dots and fluffiness—to cheer themselves up.

Poor old Earth, an old sponge, a honeycomb of empty mine shafts and dried wells. While he and his friends were wittering on, the planet underfoot had been looted. The waterways glint with weapons-grade plutonium, sneaked on barges between one wrathful nation and another, the polar ice caps melt, Venice sinks.

In the horrible old days in Europe when Rose and Isaac were hunted children, it must have been pretty clear to them how to behave, minute by minute. Men in jackboots? Up to the attic!

But even during that time when it was so dangerous to speak out, to act courageously, heroes emerged. Most of them died fruitlessly, of course, and unheralded. But now there are even monuments to some of them, and information about such people is always coming to light.

Maybe there really is no problem, maybe everything really is back to normal and maybe the whole period will sink peacefully away, to be remembered only by scholars. But if it should end, instead, in dire catastrophe, whom will the monuments of the future commemorate?

Today, all day long, Lucien has seen the president’s vacant, stricken expression staring from the ubiquitous television screens. He seemed to be talking about positioning weapons in space, colonizing the moon.

Open your books to page 167, class,
Miss Mueller shrieks.
What do you see?

Lucien sighs.

The pages are thin and sort of shiny. The illustrations are mostly black and white.

This one’s a photograph of a statue, an emperor, apparently, wearing his stone toga and his stone wreath. The real people, the living people, mill about just beyond the picture’s confines, but Lucien knows more or less what they look like—he’s seen illustrations of them, too. He knows what a viaduct is and that the ancient Romans went to plays and banquets and that they had a code of law from which his country’s own is derived. Are the people hidden by the picture frightened? Do they hear the stones working themselves loose, the temples and houses and courts beginning to crumble?

Out the window, the sun is just a tiny, tiny bit higher today than it was at this exact instant yesterday. After school, he and Robbie Stern will go play soccer in the park. In another month it will be bright and warm.

Paradise

So, Mr. Matsumoto will be coming back, and things seem pretty much as they did when he left. The apartment is clean, the cats are healthy, the art is undamaged, and the view from the terrace is exactly the same, except there’s that weird, blank spot where the towers used to stand.

“Open the next?” Madison says, holding up a bottle of champagne. “Strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, strongly disagree.”

“Strongly agree,” Lyle says.

“Thanks,” Amity says.

“Okay,” Russell says. “I’m in.”

Nathaniel shrugs and holds out his glass.

Madison pours. “Polls indicate that 100 percent of the American public approves heavy drinking,” he says.

“Oh, god, Madison,” Amity says. “Can’t we ever just
drop
it? Can’t we ever just have a nice time?”

Madison looks at her for a long moment. “Drop what?” he says, evenly.

But no one wants to get into
that
.

When Nathaniel was in his last year at college, his father began to suffer from heart trouble. It was easy enough for Nathaniel to come home on the weekends, and he’d sit with his father, gazing out the window as the autumnal light gilded the dry grass and the fallen leaves glowed.

His father talked about his own time at school, working night and day, the pride his parents had taken in him, the first college student in their family.

Over the years Nathaniel’s mother and father had grown gentler with one another and with him. Sometimes after dinner and the dishes, they’d all go out for a treat. Nathaniel would wait, an acid pity weakening his bones, while his parents debated worriedly over their choices, as if nobody ever had before or would ever have again the opportunity to eat ice cream.

Just last night, he dreamed about Delphine, a delicious champagne-style dream, full of love and beauty—a weird, high-quality love, a feeling he doesn’t remember ever having had in his waking life—a pure, wholehearted, shining love.

It hangs around him still, floating through the air out on the terrace—fragrant, shimmering, fading.

Waiting

The bell is about to ring. Closing his book Lucien hears the thrilling crash as the bloated empire tumbles down.

Gold star, Lucien!
Miss Mueller cackles deafeningly, and then she’s gone.

Charlie’s leaving, too. Lucien lifts his glass; she glances back across the thin, inflexible divide.

From farther than the moon she sees the children of some distant planet study pictures in their text: there’s Rose and Isaac at their kitchen table, Nathaniel out on Mr. Matsumoto’s terrace, Lucien alone in the dim gallery—and then the children turn the page.

“I don’t know why I committed us to any of those things,” Otto said. “I’d much prefer to be working or reading, and you’ll want all the time you can get this week to practice.”

“It’s fine with me,” William said. “I always like to see Sharon. And we’ll survive the evening with your—”

Otto winced. “Well, we will,” William said. “And don’t you want to see Naomi and Margaret and the baby as soon as they get back?”

“Everyone always says, ‘Don’t you want to see the baby, don’t you want to see the baby,’ but if I did want to see a fat, bald, confused person, obviously I’d have only to look in the mirror.”

“I was reading a remarkable article in the paper this morning about holiday depression,” William said. “Should I clip it for you? The statistics were amazing.”

“The statistics cannot have been amazing, the article cannot have been remarkable, and I am not ‘depressed.’ I just happen to be bored sick by these inane—Waving our little antennae, joining our little paws in indication of—Oh, what is the point? Why did I agree to any of this?”

“Well,” William said. “I mean, this is what we do.”

Hmm. Well, true. And the further truth was, Otto saw, that he himself wanted, in some way, to see Sharon; he himself wanted, in some way, to see Naomi and Margaret and the baby as soon as possible. And it was even he himself who had agreed to join his family for Thanksgiving. It would be straining some concept—possibly the concept of “wanted,” possibly the concept of “self”—to say that he himself had wanted to join them, and yet there clearly must have been an implicit alternative to joining them that was even less desirable, or he would not, after all, have agreed to it.

It had taken him—how long?—years and years to establish a viable, if not pristine, degree of estrangement from his family. Which was no doubt why, he once explained to William, he had tended, over the decades, to be so irascible and easily exhausted. The sustained effort, the subliminal concentration that was required to detach the stubborn prehensile hold was enough to wear a person right out and keep him from ever getting down to anything of real substance.

Weddings had lapsed entirely, birthdays were a phone call at the most, and at Christmas, Otto and William sent lavish gifts of out-of-season fruits, in the wake of which would arrive recriminatory little thank-you notes. From mid-December to mid-January they would absent themselves, not merely from the perilous vicinity of Otto’s family, but from the entire country, to frolic in blue water under sunny skies.

When his mother died, Otto experienced an exhilarating melancholy; most of the painful encounters and obligations would now be a thing of the past. Life, with its humorous theatricality, had bestowed and revoked with one gesture, and there he abruptly was, in the position he felt he’d been born for: he was alone in the world.

Or alone in the world, anyway, with William. Marching ahead of his sisters and brother—Corinne, Martin, and Sharon—Otto was in the front ranks now, death’s cannon fodder and so on; he had become old overnight, and free.

Old and free! Old and free…

Still, he made himself available to provide legal advice or to arrange a summer internship for some child or nephew. He saw Sharon from time to time. From time to time there were calls: “Of course you’re too busy, but…” “Of course you’re not interested, but…” was how they began. This was the one thing Corinne and her husband and Martin and whichever wife were always all in accord about—that Otto seemed to feel he was too good for the rest of them, despite the obvious indications to the contrary.

Who was too good for whom? It often came down to a show of force. When Corinne had called a week or so earlier about Thanksgiving, Otto, addled by alarm, said, “We’re having people ourselves, I’m afraid.”

Corinne’s silence was like a mirror, flashing his tiny, harmless lie back to him in huge magnification, all covered with sticky hairs and microbes.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“Please try,” Corinne said. The phrase had the unassailable authority of a road sign appearing suddenly around the bend:
FALLING ROCK
. “Otto, the children are growing up.”

“Children! What children? Your children grew up years ago, Corinne. Your children are old now, like us.”

“I meant, of course, Martin’s. The new ones. Martin and Laurie’s. And there’s Portia.”

Portia? Oh, yes. The little girl. The sole, thank heavens, issue, of Martin’s marriage to that crazy Viola.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Otto said again, this time less cravenly. It was Corinne’s own fault. A person of finer sensibilities would have written a note, or used e-mail—or would face-savingly have left a message at his office, giving him time to prepare some well-crafted deterrent rather than whatever makeshift explosive he would obviously be forced to lob back at her under direct attack.

“Wesley and I are having it in the city this year,” Corinne was saying. “No need to come all the way out to the nasty country. A few hours and it will all be over with. Seriously, Otto, you’re an integral element. We’re keeping it simple this year.”

“‘This year?’ Corinne, there have been no other years. You do not observe Thanksgiving.”

“In fact, Otto, we do. And we all used to.”

“Who?”

“All of us.”

“Never. When? Can you imagine Mother being thankful for anything?”

“We always celebrated Thanksgiving when Father was alive.”

“I remember no such thing.”

“I do. I remember, and so does Martin.”

“Martin was four when Father died!”

“Well, you were little, too.”

“I was twice Martin’s age.”

“Oh, Otto—I just feel sad, sometimes, to tell you the truth, don’t you? It’s all going so fast! I’d like to see everyone in the same room once a century or so. I want to see everybody well and happy. I mean, you and Martin and Sharon were my brothers and sister. What was
that
all about? Don’t you remember? Playing together all the time?”

“I just remember Martin throwing up all the time.”

“You’ll be nice to him, won’t you, Otto? He’s still very sensitive. He won’t want to talk about the lawsuit.”

“Have you spoken to Sharon?”

“Well, that’s something I wanted to talk to you about, actually. I’m afraid I might have off ended her. I stressed the fact that it was only to be us this year. No aunts or uncles, no cousins, no friends. Just us. And husbands or wives. Husband. And wife. Or whatever. And children, naturally, but she became very hostile.”

“Assuming William to be ‘whatever,’” Otto said, “why shouldn’t Sharon bring a friend if she wants to?”

“William is
family
. And surely you remember when she brought that person to Christmas! The person with the feet? I wish you’d go by and talk to her in the next few days. She seems to listen to you.”

Otto fished up a magazine from the floor—one of the popular science magazines William always left lying around—and idly opened it.

“Wesley and I reach out to her,” Corinne was saying. “And so does Martin, but she doesn’t respond. I know it can be hard for her to be with people, but we’re not people—we’re family.”

“I’m sure she understands that, Corinne.”

“I hope you do, too, Otto.”

How clearly he could see, through the phone line, this little sister of his—in her fifties now—the six-year-old’s expression of aggrieved anxiety long etched decisively on her face.

“In any case,” she said, “I’ve called.”

And yet there was something to what Corinne had said; they had been one another’s environs as children. The distance between them had been as great, in any important way, as it was now, but there had been no other beings close by, no other beings through whom they could probe or illumine the mystifying chasms and absences and yearnings within themselves. They had been born into the arid clutter of one another’s behavior, good and bad, their measles, skinned knees, report cards…

A barren landscape dotted with clutter. Perhaps the life of the last dinosaurs, as they ranged, puzzled and sorrowful, across the comet-singed planet, was similar to childhood. It hadn’t been a pleasant time, surely, and yet one did have an impulse to acknowledge one’s antecedents, now and again. Hello, that was us, it still is, good bye.

“I don’t know,” William said. “It doesn’t seem fair to put any pressure on Sharon.”

“Heaven forfend. But I did promise Corinne I’d speak with Sharon. And, after all, I haven’t actually seen her for some time.”

“We could just go have a plain old visit, though. I don’t know. Urging her to go to Corinne’s—I’m not really comfortable with that.”

“Oof, William, phrase, please, jargon.”

“Why is that jargon?”

“Why? How should I know why? Because it is. You can say, ‘I’m uncomfortable
about
that,’ or ‘That makes me uncomfortable.’ But ‘I’m uncomfortable
with
that’ is simply jargon.” He picked up a book sitting next to him on the table and opened it.
Relativity for Dummies
. “Good heavens,” he said, snapping the book shut. “
Obviously
Martin doesn’t want to talk about the lawsuit. Why bother to mention that to me? Does she think I’m going to ask Martin whether it’s true that he’s been misrepresenting the value of his client’s stock? Am I likely to talk about it? I’m perfectly happy to read about it in the
Times
every day, like everyone else.”

“You know,” William said, “we could go away early this year. We could just pick up and leave on Wednesday, if you’d like.”

“I would not like. I would like you to play in your concert, as always.”

William took the book from Otto and held Otto’s hand between his own. “They’re not really so bad, you know, your family,” he said.

Sometimes William’s consolations were oddly like provocations. “Easy for you to say,” Otto said.

“Not that easy.”

“I’m sorry,” Otto said. “I know.”

Just like William to suggest going away early for Otto’s sake, when he looked forward so much to his concert! The little orchestra played publicly only once a year, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Otto endured the grating preparatory practicing, not exactly with equanimity, it had to be admitted, but with relative forbearance, just for the pleasure of seeing William’s radiant face on the occasion. William in his suit, William fussing over the programs, William busily arranging tickets for friends. Otto’s sunny, his patient, his deeply good William. Toward the end of every year, when the city lights glimmered through the fuzzy winter dark, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, William with his glowing violin, urging the good-natured, timid audience into passionate explorations of the unseen world. And every year now, from the audience, Otto felt William’s impress stamped on the planet, more legible and valuable by one year; all the more legible and valuable for the one year’s diminution in William’s beauty.

How spectacular he had been the first time Otto brought him to a family event, that gladiatorial Christmas thirty-odd years earlier. How had Otto ever marshaled the nerve to do it?

Oh, one could say till one was blue in the face that Christmas was a day like any other, what difference would it make if he and William were to spend that particular day apart, and so on. And yet.

Yes, the occasion forced the issue, didn’t it. Either he and William would both attend, or Otto would attend alone, or they would not attend together. But whatever it was that one decided to do, it would be a declaration—to the family, and to the other. And, the fact was, to oneself.

Steeled by new love, in giddy defiance, Otto had arrived at the house with William, to all intents and purposes, on his arm.

A tidal wave of nervous prurience had practically blown the door out from inside the instant he and William ascended the front step. And all evening aunts, uncles, cousins, mother, and siblings had stared at William beadily, as if a little bunny had loped out into a clearing in front of them.

William’s beauty, and the fact that he was scarcely twenty, had embarrassed Otto on other occasions, but never so searingly. “How
intelligent
he is!” Otto’s relatives kept whispering to one another loudly, meaning, apparently, that it was a marvel he could speak. Unlike, the further implication was, the men they’d evidently been imagining all these years.

Otto had brought someone to a family event only once before—also on a Christmas, with everyone in attendance: Diandra Fetlin, a feverishly brilliant colleague, far less beautiful than William. During the turkey, she thumped Otto on the arm whenever he made a good point in the argument he was having with Wesley, and continued to eat with solemn assiduity. Then, while the others applied themselves to dessert, a stuccolike fantasy requiring vigilance, Diandra had delivered an explication of one of the firm’s recent cases that was worth three semesters of law school. No one commented on
her
intelligence. And no one had been in the least deceived by Otto’s tepid display of interest in her.