Twilight of the Superheroes (24 page)

Authors: Deborah Eisenberg

BOOK: Twilight of the Superheroes

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I did manage to throw out his card. I couldn’t help seeing the name; the address of his office twinkled by. But I made an effort to cleanse them from my mind right away, and I
think I’d succeeded by the time the card landed in the trash basket.

There’s no chance that he would turn out to be the person who appeared to me this afternoon, really no chance at all. And I doubt I’m the person he was imagining, either—which for all I know, actually, was simply a demented slut. And the fact is, that while I might not be doing Oliver or John much good, I’m certainly in a position to do them both a great deal of harm.

I’d intended to stay in today, to run some errands, to get down to some paperwork myself. But there we are. The things that are hidden! I felt such a longing to go into town, to go to the museum. It’s not something I often do, but it’s been a difficult week, grueling, really, with Oliver here, ranging about as if he were in a cage, talking talking talking about those hearings and heaven only knows what—and I kept picturing the silent, white galleries.

Looking at a painting takes a certain composure, a certain resolve, but when you really do look at one it can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It’s as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history—a sensation, really, that’s a lot like hope.

It was probably around eleven when I parked the car and went down into the metro. There was that awful, artificial light, like a disinfectant, and the people, silhouettes, standing and walking, the shapeless, senseless sounds. The trains pass through in gray streaks, and it’s as if you’ve always been there and you always will be. You can sense the cameras, now, too—that’s all new, I think, or relatively new—and you can even see some of them, big, empty eyes that miss nothing. You could be anywhere, anywhere at all; you could be an unknowing participant
in a secret experiment. And with all those lives streaking toward you and streaking away, you feel so strongly, don’t you, the singularity and the accidentalness of your own life.

We passed each other on the platform. I hadn’t particularly noticed him until that second, and yet in some way he’d impressed himself so forcibly upon me it was as if I’d known him elsewhere.

I walked on for what seemed to be a long interval before I allowed myself to turn around—and he was turning, too, of course, at just the same instant. We looked at each other, and we smiled, just a little, and then I turned and went on my way again.

When I reached the end of the platform, I turned back, and he was waiting.

He was handsome, yes, and maybe that was all it was about, really. And maybe it was just that beautiful appearance of his that caused his beautiful clothing, too, his beautiful overcoat and scarf and shoes to seem, themselves, like an expression of merit, of integrity, of something attended to properly and tenderly, rather than an expression of mere vanity, for instance, or greed.

Because, there are a lot of attractive men in this world, and if one of them happens to be standing there, well, that’s nice, but that’s that. This is a different thing. The truth is that people’s faces contain specific messages, people’s faces are secret messages for certain other people. And when I saw this particular face, I thought, oh, yes—so that’s it.

The sky was scudding by out the taxi window, and we hardly spoke—just phrases, streamers caught for an instant as they flashed past in the bright, tumultuous air. And no one at the reception desk looked at us knowingly or scornfully, despite
the absence of luggage and the classically suspect hour. It was as solemn and grand, in its way, as a wedding.

We had taken the taxi, had stood at the desk;
we had done it
—the thought kept tumbling over me like pealing bells as we rose up in the elevator, our hands lightly clasped. And we were solemn, and so happy, or at least I was, as we entered our room, the beautiful room that we might as well have been the first people ever to see—elated as if by some solution, when just minutes before we’d been on the metro platform, clinging fiercely, as if before a decisive separation, the way lovers do in wartime.

Additional Praise for
Twilight of the Superheroes

“By moving fluently back and forth between the present and the past, Deborah Eisenberg shows how memories and long-ago events shadow current decisions, how the gap between expectations and reality grows ever wider as the years scroll by. Instead of forcing her characters’ stories into neat, arbitrary, preordained shapes, she allows them to grow organically into oddly shaped, asymmetrical narratives—narratives that possess all the surprising twists and dismaying turns of real life.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

“Eisenberg offers enough insight and intelligent observation to amply justify her reputation as the American Alice Munro.”

—Yvonne Zipp,
The Christian Science Monitor

“Eisenberg’s filament-thin weavings of desire, obligation, and missed opportunities remind one strongly of Henry James; and in her language and sense of fractured consciousness she has also a close relation in Virginia Woolf … . These stories are intense, invariably erotic, and thoroughly startling.”

—Vince Passaro,
O, The Oprah Magazine

“Reading Eisenberg makes you wish, as you study the family in front of you in the grocery line, that you could see their thoughts rendered as one of her stunning inner monologues … . Eisenberg, with her wide embrace of metaphor and keen sense of the eternal—the endlessly renewing cycle of human puttering—understands that behind every unexceptional face are notions and visions no one else has ever known.”

—Judith Lewis,
Los Angeles Times

“The six stories here … are her most ambitious and beautiful works to date … . Deborah Eisenberg is consummately urban, as nonchalantly and inadvertently sophisticated as Proust … . The title story offers the most delicate, tangential, accurate, and mysterious treatment of [9/11] that I’ve read so far.”

—Mona Simpson,
The Atlantic

“One of the fascinations of Eisenberg’s prose is figuring out which hole in the fence she will peer through … . You can depend upon her to put our dilemmas to us in stories that are modest, moral, inventive, and afraid. They will stick to your ribs.”

—Todd McEwen,
The Guardian
(U.K.)

“One of the great pleasures of Eisenberg’s work is the violence it does to the old chestnut that a short story’s artfulness is best measured by how much is left out … . Exhilarating.”

—Jonathan Dee,
Harper’s Magazine

“Twilight of the Superheroes
demonstrates Eisenberg’s astonishing ability to create stories brimming with big ideas and deft social commentary.”

—Elissa Schappell,
Vanity Fair

“When you finish the book your first impulse is to go back and read it again. How come? Magic.”

—David Gates,
Newsweek

“Ambitious and resonant … Whether the subjects be lovely young girls grown old or waning superpowers, Eisenberg makes masterful work out of marking their decline and fall.”

—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s
Fresh Air

“The collection is characterized by these brutal, beautiful reflections on the human condition. Brooding, but never melancholic, Eisenberg’s prose presents a sparkling clarity of vision, and her poignant ability to tinge moments of human heartbreak with impassive flippancy and irony renders tears emotionally inadequate.”

—Fiona Atherton,
Scotland on Sunday
(U.K.)

“With every story, with every collection, Eisenberg offers new ways of seeing and feeling, as if something were being perfected at the core … . We find writing such as this elsewhere only in the prose of a select few story writers such as James Salter and Richard Ford.”

—Alan Cheuse,
San Francisco Chronicle

“The deepest pleasure in Ms. Eisenberg’s stories is their vertiginous unpredictability, like obstacle courses the author jumps and rolls and shimmies through, clasping the reader to her like an infant … . These are fearless, fierce, light-bearing stories, offered in defense of what still matters.”

—Regina Marler,
The New York Observer

“Deborah Eisenberg is at it again, saying things that other writers don’t, won’t, or can’t say.”

—Mary Brennan,
The Seattle Times

“Eisenberg forces us to ask the tough questions, yet she is careful not to harp; each of her stories examines an ethical maxim, yet they all poke fun rather than come across as pedantic.”

—Tiffany Lee-Youngren,
The San Diego Union-Tribune

“A short-story superstar whose work ranks with that of Alice Munro … Completely absorbing.”

—Vick Boughton,
People

“Twilight of the Superheroes
is the most successful work of fiction so far to marry a literary imagination to a liberal critique of what has happened to America since September 11, 2001.”

—
The Telegraph
(U.K.)

“These are punky, cleverly wrought stories about 9/11, terminal illness, mental illness, and growing old whose ironic characters and surface flippancy belie their emotional seriousness … . Eisenberg’s bold prose and observation makes this collection a dizzying experience.”

—Claire Allfree,
Metro
(London)

ALSO BY DEBORAH EISENBERG

Pastorale
Transactions in a Foreign Currency
Under the 82nd Airborne
Air: 24 Hours: Jennifer Bartlett
The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg
All Around Atlantis

Deborah Eisenberg is the author of three previous collections of stories. The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Rea Award, and a Whiting Writers’ Award, she lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Virginia.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Incalculable thanks to Elizabeth Richebourg Rea and the late Michael Rea of the Dungannon Foundation, champions and connoisseurs of the short story; to Verena Nolte and the Villa Waldberta; and to the Lannan Foundation—all the people there, and in Marfa, who were so kind to me!

TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES. Copyright © 2006 by Deborah Eisenberg. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which these stories originally appeared: “Twilight of the Superheroes” in
Final Edition;
“Some Other, Better Otto” in
The Yale Review;
“Like It or Not” in
The Threepenny Review
; “Window” and “Revenge of the Dinosaurs” in
Tin House;
and “The Flaw in the Design” in
The Virginia Quarterly Review
.

First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

eISBN 9780374707750

First eBook Edition : April 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eisenberg, Deborah.

Twilight of the superheroes / Deborah Eisenberg. p. cm.

Contents: Twilight of the superheroes—Some other, better Otto—Like it or not—Window—Revenge of the dinosaurs—The flaw in the design.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42593-7
ISBN-10: 0-312-42593-7

1. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3555.1793T87 2006
813’.54—dc22

2005042659

First Picador Edition: February 2007