The Men's Club Page 2

  Harold raised his hands for everyone to see.

  Kramer said, ‘Don’t listen to that jackass, Harold. Nothing wrong with your hands. I’m getting more beer.’

  As he walked towards the kitchen, Cavanaugh followed, saying, ‘I don’t know what this life-story business is about.’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Kramer. ‘You get the beers.’

  Cavanaugh returned with the beers and Kramer with a metal footlocker, dragging it into our circle. A padlock knocked against the front. Kramer, squatting, tried to fit a key into the lock. His hands began shaking. Cavanaugh bent beside him. ‘You need a little help?’ Kramer handed him the key, saying, ‘Do it.’ Cavanaugh inserted the key. The lock snapped open as if shocked by love.

  Kramer heaved back the lid of the footlocker and withdrew to his pillow, lighting a cigarette, hands still shaking. ‘This is it, my life story.’ His voice laboured against emotion. ‘You guys can see my junk, my trinkets. Photos, diaries, papers of every kind.’

  Had Kramer left the room it would have been easier to look, but he remained on his pillow staring at the open footlocker, his life. Paul suddenly scrambled towards it on hands and knees, looked, plucked out a handful of snapshots, and fanned them across the rug. Each of them bore an inscription. Paul read aloud: ‘Coney Island, 1953, Tina. Party at Josephine’s, New Year’s, 1965. Holiday Inn, New Orleans, 1975, Gwen.’ He looked from the photos to Kramer, smiling. ‘All these pictures in your box are women?’

  Kramer, in the difficult voice, answered, ‘I have many photos. I have my navy discharge papers, my high-school diploma, my first driver’s licence. I have all my elementary-school notebooks, even spelling exams from the third grade. I have maybe twenty-five fountain pens. All my old passports. Everything is in that box.’

  Paul nodded, still smiling. ‘But these photos, Kramer. Are all these photos women?’

  ‘I have had six hundred and twenty-two women.’

  ‘Right on,’ shouted Berliner, his soul projecting towards Kramer through big green eyes, doglike, waiting for a signal. Paul took out more photos and dropped them among the others. Over a hundred now, women in bathing suits, in winter coats, in fifties styles, sixties styles, seventies styles. Spirits of the decades. If men make history, women wear its look in their faces and figures. Fat during the Depression era; slender when times are good. But to me Kramer’s women looked fundamentally the same. One poor sweetie between twenty and thirty years old forever. On a beach, leaning against a railing, a tree, a brick wall, with sun in her eyes, squinting at the camera. A hundred fragments, each complete if you cared to scrutinise. A whole person who could say her name. Maybe love Kramer. That she squinted touched me.

  Kramer, with his meticulously sculpted hair, cigarette trembling in his fingers, waited. Nobody spoke, not even Berliner. Looking at the pictures, I was reminded of flashers. See this. It is my entire crotch.

  Then Berliner blurted, ‘Great. Great. Let’s do it. Let’s all talk about our sexual experience.’ His face jerked in every direction, seeking encouragement.

  As if he’d heard nothing, Kramer said, ‘I was born in Trenton, New Jersey. My father was a union organiser. In those days it was dangerous work. He was a communist, he lived for an idea. My mother believed in everything he said, but she was always depressed. She sat in the bedroom, in her robe, smoking cigarettes. She never cleaned the house. When I was six years old I was shopping and cooking, like my mother’s mother. I cannot remember one minute which I can call my childhood. I was my mother’s mother. I had a life with no beginning, no childhood.’

  ‘Right,’ said Berliner. ‘You had your childhood later. Six hundred and twenty-two mothers. Right?’

  ‘The women are women. Eventually, I will have another six hundred. I don’t know where my father is, but when I hear the word “workers” or the word “struggle”, I think of him. If I see a hardhat carrying a lunch pail, I think he is struggling. My mother now lives in New York. Twice a year I phone New York and get migraine headaches. Blindness. Nausea. Just say the area code 212 and I feel pain in my eyes.’

  I’d been looking at Kramer almost continuously, but now I noticed that his eyes didn’t focus steadily. His right eye was slightly askew. He blinked and brought it into line with the other eye. After a while it drifted away again. He’d let it go for a moment, then blink, bringing it back. His voice was trancelike, compulsive, as if trying to tell us something before he was overwhelmed by doubt and confusion.

  Cavanaugh said, ‘What about Nancy?’

  ‘What about her?’ Kramer sounded unsure who Nancy might be.

  ‘Nancy Kramer. She lives here, doesn’t she? These are her plants, aren’t they?’ Cavanaugh was looking at the photos on the rug, not the plants.

  ‘You mean the women? What does Nancy think about my women?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘We have a good understanding. Nancy goes out, too. It’s cool. The plants are mine.’

  ‘Yours?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I love them. I’ve got them on my tape recorder. I could play you the fig tree in the corner.’ Kramer said this with a sly, dopey look, trying to change the mood, trying to make a joke.

  ‘Too much. Too much, Kramer,’ said Berliner. ‘My wife and me are exactly the same. I mean we also have an understanding.’

  I said, ‘Let Kramer talk.’

  Kramer shook his head and bent towards Berliner. ‘That’s all right. Do you want to say more, Solly?’

  Berliner looked at his knees like a guilty kid. ‘You go on. I’m sorry I interrupted.’

  Cavanaugh, imitating Kramer, bent towards Berliner. ‘Solly, aren’t you jealous when your wife is making it with another guy?’

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Yeah, jealous.’

  ‘No, man. I’m liberated.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ I said.

  Berliner said, as if it were obvious, ‘I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘Liberated means you don’t feel anything?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m liberated.’

  Canterbury, with a huge stare of delight, began repeating, ‘You don’t feel anything. You don’t feel anything.’ Blond and lean, light blue eyes. He strained forward again to speak, then straightened quickly, as if he’d gone too far.

  Berliner shrugged. ‘Once, I felt something.’

  Crossing and uncrossing his legs, seeming to writhe in his creamy slacks, Canterbury said, ‘Tell us about that, please. Tell us about the time you felt something.’

  ‘Does everyone want to hear?’ said Berliner, looking at me.

  I said, ‘Yes.’

  His voice flooded with accommodation. ‘We had a weekend in the mountains with another couple. A ski cabin near Lake Tahoe. The first night we got a little drunk after dinner and somebody – maybe me – yeah, yeah, me – I said let’s trade partners. It was my own idea, right? So we traded. It was okay. It wasn’t the first time we did it. But then I heard my wife moaning. It was a small cabin. And that was okay, but she was not just moaning. You know what I mean? She was moaning with love.’

  ‘Love?’ said Kramer.

  ‘Yeah. Moaning with love. She was overdoing it, you know what I mean. She was doing love. I wanted to kill her.’

  Cavanaugh reached over and squeezed Berliner’s arm. Berliner was still smiling, the green eyes searching our faces for the meaning of what he’d said. ‘Is that what you wanted to hear, Harold?’

  ‘Did it ruin your weekend?’

  ‘It was horrible, man. I lost my erection.’

  Berliner began screeing again and I heard myself doing it, too, like him, making that creepy sound.

  ‘It was horrible, horrible. I was ashamed. I ran out of the cabin and sat on a rock. My wife started calling through the door, “Solly, Solly, Solly Berliner.” Then she came outside, laughing, and found me. I showed her what she had done to me. She said it wasn’t her fault. She said it was my idea. I hit her and said that was my idea, too. She started crying
. Soon as she started crying, my erection came back.’

  Kramer said, ‘What happened next?’

  ‘But you were talking, Kramer,’ I said. ‘You know what happened next. Next she hit him and they made it together. It’s a cliché. You should finish telling your story. You should have a full turn.’

  Berliner, incoherent with excitement, shouted, ‘How the hell do you know? I’m telling what happened to me, me, me.’

  ‘All right, all right. What happened next?’

  ‘She hit me and we made it together.’

  Cavanaugh, with two fists, hammered the rug until everyone quieted. Then he said, ‘Look at Kramer.’ Kramer was slumped forward, dark face hanging, glancing vaguely back at Cavanaugh.

  ‘Let’s let him alone,’ said Cavanaugh. Kramer grinned and sat up, but he didn’t protest. Cavanaugh continued, ‘Maybe Kramer will want to say more later. I’d like to hear about the childhood he didn’t have, but I think we’re talking about love tonight. I’ll tell you guys a love story. Okay?’

  I said, ‘Kramer tells us he made it with six hundred women. Berliner says he traded his wife, then beat her up and had an erection. You call that love?’

  Cavanaugh gave me a flat look, as if I’d become strange to him.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Hey, man, what do you want to hear about? Toothpaste and deodorants?’

  ‘You’re right, Cavanaugh. I give up. I bet your story is about how you made it with ten thousand high-school cheerleaders.’

  Cavanaugh stared at the place in the rug he had just hammered. The big body was immobilised, the whole man getting things in order, remembering.

  ‘About three months after we got married, my second wife and I started having arguments. Bad scenes. We would go to bed hating each other. There were months with no sex. I didn’t know who was more miserable. I was making a lot of money playing ball and I was playing good. It should have been good for us altogether. The marriage should have been fine. In the middle of a game with the crowd screaming, I’d think this was no fantastic deal, because I had no love at home. Soon there was nothing in my body but anger. I got into fights with my own teammates. I couldn’t shave without slicing my face. I was smoking cigarettes. I had something against my body and wanted to hurt it. When I told Sarah I was moving out, she said, “Great.” She wanted to live alone. I moved out and stayed with a friend until I found an apartment. One day in the grocery store, I was throwing every kind of thing into my shopping cart. I was making sure nothing I needed would show up later as not being there. And this woman, I notice, is pushing her cart behind me, up and down the aisles, giggling. I knew she was giggling at me. When I got to the cashier she is behind me in line, still giggling, and then she says, very sweet and tickled, “You must have a station wagon out there in the parking lot.” I said, “I have a pickup truck. Do you want a ride?” A man buying so much food, she figured, has a family. Safe to ask for a ride. She didn’t have a car. I gave her a ride and carried her groceries upstairs to her apartment. A little boy was sitting on the floor watching TV. She introduced us and offered me a drink and we sat in another room talking. The boy took care of himself. Like in Kramer’s story. He cooked dinner for himself. He gave himself a bath. Then went to bed. But his mother wasn’t depressed like Kramer’s. She laughed and teased me and asked a lot of questions. I talked about myself for five or six hours. We ate dinner around midnight, and then, at four in the morning, I woke up in her bed, thinking about my ton of groceries rotting in the pickup. But that wasn’t what woke me. What woke me was the feeling I wanted to go back to my place. I hadn’t left one woman to sleep with another. I mean I hadn’t left my wife to do that. I wanted to go back to my own apartment, my own bed. I didn’t know what I was doing in this woman’s bed. I got up and dressed and left. As I was about to drive away she comes running to the window of my pickup, naked. “Where are you going at this hour?” I said I wanted to go home. She says, “Okay, I’ll come with you.” I told her no and said I would phone her. She said okay and smiled and said good night. She was like that little boy. Or he was like her. Easy. Okay, okay, good night. I didn’t think I would phone her. Now this is my story. I woke up the next afternoon. I liked it, waking alone, but I felt something strange. I wanted something. Then I remembered the woman and I knew what I wanted. I wanted to phone her. So I went to the phone and I realised I didn’t know her number. I didn’t even know her name. Well, I showered, got dressed, and stopped thinking about her. I went out for something. I didn’t know what. I had everything I needed in the apartment. But I started driving and right away I was driving back to the grocery store, as if the pickup had a mind of its own. I was just holding the wheel. I didn’t get farther than the grocery store, because I didn’t remember where she lived. I remembered leaving the store with her, driving towards the bay, and that’s all. She said, “Turn right, turn left, go straight,” but I never noticed street names or anything. Now I wanted to see that woman more and more. The next day I went back to the grocery and hung around the parking lot. I did that every day for a week, at different times. I thought I remembered how she looked talking to me through the window of my pickup, how she smiled and said okay. I wanted to see her again badly. But I wasn’t sure I could recognise her in the street. She was wearing gold loop earrings, jeans and sandals. What if she came along in a skirt and heels? Anyhow, I never saw her again.’

  *

  Cavanaugh stopped. It was obvious he had no more to say, but Kramer said, ‘Is that your story?’

  ‘Yes.’ Cavanaugh leaned back, watching us.

  ‘That’s your love story?’ I asked.

  ‘Right. I fell in love with a woman I couldn’t find the next day. She might live around the corner.’

  ‘You still love her?’ asked Paul, tremendous delicacy in his voice, the slight small body poised, full of tenderness and tension.

  Cavanaugh smiled at him with melancholy eyes. The whole expression of his great face and body suggested that he’d been humbled by fate.

  ‘That can’t be it,’ said Paul. ‘That can’t be the end.’

  ‘The end.’

  ‘Cavanaugh,’ said Paul, ‘I’ve known you for years. How come you never told me that story?’

  ‘Maybe I’m not sure it happened.’

  ‘You did go back to the grocery?’

  ‘So what?’

  I said, ‘Paul means, if you looked for her, it happened.’

  ‘I still look. When Sarah sends me out to do the shopping, she doesn’t know the risk she’s taking.’

  ‘Cavanaugh,’ I said, ‘do you think you ever passed her in the street and she recognised you but you didn’t recognise her? That happened to me once. A woman stopped me and said, “Hello,” and when I stood there staring like a fool, she turned and walked away. She’d recognised me.’

  ‘Anybody would recognise Cavanaugh,’ said Kramer, ‘from his picture in the papers.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Berliner, ‘I have an idea. We can all look for her. What do you say?’

  Paul said, ‘Shut up, man.’

  ‘Why is everyone telling me to shut up? I drove here from San Jose and everyone tells me to shut up.’ Berliner sighed in a philosophical way. He’d seen into the nature of life. ‘Looking for Cavanaugh’s woman. To me it’s a good idea. Hey, man, I have a better idea. Cavanaugh, take a quick look through Kramer’s snapshots.’

  ‘She wasn’t one of them. She was a queen.’

  ‘Queen what?’ shouted Kramer. ‘My women have names. What did you call her? You call her Queen?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kramer. Take it easy. He thinks I crapped on his harem.’

  I said, ‘Let me talk. I want to tell a love story.’

  ‘Great,’ said Berliner. ‘Everybody shut up. Go, man. Sing the blues.’

  ‘You don’t want to hear my story? I listened to yours, Berliner.’

  ‘Yes he does,’ said Kramer. ‘Let him talk, Solly.’

  ‘I didn�
��t try to stop him.’

  Cavanaugh said, ‘Just begin.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Berliner, grinning, brilliant and stiff with teeth.

  ‘So far,’ I said, ‘I’ve heard three stories about one thing. Cavanaugh calls it love. I call it stories about the other woman. By which I mean the one who is not the wife. To you guys, only the other woman is interesting. If there weren’t first a wife, there couldn’t be the other woman. Especially you, Berliner. Moaning, just moaning, your wife is only your wife. Moaning with love, she’s the other woman. And Kramer with his snapshots. Look at them. He spent his life trying to photograph the other woman, but every time he snapped a picture it was like getting married. Like eliminating another woman from the possibility of being the other woman. And Cavanaugh, why can’t he find his woman? Because if he finds her she won’t be the other woman anymore. This way he protects his marriage. Every time he goes to the grocery store and doesn’t see the other woman, which is every single time, his marriage is stronger.’

  Cavanaugh, frowning at me, said, ‘What are you trying to tell us? What’s all this about the other woman? Why don’t you say it, man?’

  ‘I am saying it.’

  Kramer then said, ‘You’re trying to tell us you love your wife. You think I don’t love mine? You think Solly doesn’t love his wife?’

  Berliner cried, ‘If that’s all you think, you’re right. I hate my wife.’

  ‘Tell your story,’ said Cavanaugh. ‘Enough philosophy.’

  *

  ‘I don’t know if I can tell it. I never told it before. It’s about a woman who was my friend in high school and college. Her name is Marilyn. We practically grew up together. She lives in Chicago now. She’s a violinist in a symphony orchestra. I spent more time with her than any other woman except maybe my mother. She wasn’t like a sister. She was like a friend, a very close friend. I couldn’t have had such a friendship with a man. We’d go out together and if I brought her home late I’d stay over at her place, in the same bed. Nothing sexual. Between us it would have been a crime. We would fight plenty, say terrible things to each other, but we were close. She phoned me every day and we stayed on the phone for an hour. We went to parties together when neither of us had a date. Showing up with her increased my chances of meeting some girl. It gave me a kind of power, walking in with Marilyn, free to pick up somebody else. She had the same power. We never analysed our relationship, but we joked about what other people thought. My mother would answer the phone and if she heard Marilyn’s voice she’d say, “It’s your future wife.” But she worried about us. She warned me that any woman I was serious about would object to Marilyn. Or she’d say it wasn’t nice, me and Marilyn so thick with each other, because I was ruining her chances of meeting a man. That wasn’t true. Marilyn had plenty of affairs. All of them ended badly, but I had nothing to do with that. One of her men scissored her dresses into rags. Another flung her Siamese cat out the window. She always found some guy who was well educated, had pleasant manners, and turned out to be a brute. She suffered, but nothing destroyed her. She had her violin. She also had me. Once, when I was out of a job and no longer living at home with my mother, she loaned me money and let me stay at her place for weeks. I was trying to decide what to do – get another job, go back to school – and Marilyn didn’t urge me to hurry. I didn’t even have to ask her if I could stay at her place. I just appeared with my bags. One night she came home with a friend, a girl who looked something like her. Curly brown hair, blue eyes, and beautiful skin, faintly olive-coloured. They were also the same size. Before dinner was over, Marilyn remembered something important she had to do. She excused herself and went to a movie. Her friend and I were alone in the apartment. It was glorious. A few days later, talking to Marilyn about this and that, I mentioned her friend. Marilyn said she didn’t want to hear about her. That friendship was over and it was something she couldn’t discuss. Furthermore, she said, I had acted badly that night at dinner, driving her out of her own apartment. I said, “I thought you left as a favour to me. I thought you did it deliberately.” She said she did do it deliberately, but only because I made it extremely obvious that I wanted her to get out. Now I began to feel angry. I told her she didn’t have to leave her own apartment for my sake and it was rotten of her to make me feel guilty about it after I’d started having very good feelings about her friend. I said this thinking it would prevent an argument; change everything. Marilyn would laugh; give me a hug. Instead, she lights a cigarette and begins smoking with quick half-drags, flicking ashes all over her couch. Then she says, “Why don’t you say that you consider me physically disgusting and you always have.” This was my old friend Marilyn speaking, but it seemed like science fiction. It looked like her. It sounded like her. It was her, but it wasn’t. Some weird mongoose had seized her soul. Then she starts telling me about what is inside my head, things she has always known though I tried to hide them from her. Her voice is bitter and nasty. She says she knows I can’t stand her breasts and the birthmark on her neck sickens me. I said, “What birthmark?” She says, “Who are you trying to kid? I’ve seen you looking at it a thousand times when you thought I didn’t notice.” I sat down beside her on the couch. She says, “Get away from me, you pig.” I felt confused. Ashamed and frightened at the same time. Then she jumps off the couch and strides out of the room. I hear her slamming around in the toilet, bottles toppling out of her medicine cabinet into the sink. Smashing. I said, “Marilyn, are you all right?” No answer. Finally, she comes out wearing a bathrobe with nothing underneath and the robe is open. But she is standing there as if nothing has changed since she left the room, and she talks to me again in the same nasty voice. She sneers and accuses me of things I couldn’t have imagined, let alone thought about her, as she says I did, every day, all the time, pretending I was her friend. Suddenly I’m full of a new feeling. Not what a normal person would call sexual feeling, but what does a penis know. It isn’t a connoisseur of normal sex. Besides, I was a lot younger, still mystified by my own chemicals. I leap off the couch and grab her. No, I find myself leaping, grabbing her, and she’s twisting, trying to hit me, really fighting. She’s seriously trying to hurt me, but there’s no screaming or cursing, there’s only the two of us breathing and sweating, and then she begins to collapse, to slide towards the floor. Next thing I’m on top of her. I’m wearing my clothes, she’s lying on her open robe. It’s supernaturally exciting. Both of us are shivering and wild. We fell asleep like that and we slept at least an hour. I woke when I felt her moving. The lights were on. We were looking at each other. She says, “This is very discouraging.” Then she went to her bedroom and shut the door. I got up and followed her and knocked at the door. She opens it and lets me kiss her. Then she shut the door again. I went to sleep in the living room, and left early the next morning. Six months later she wrote me a letter at my mother’s address, telling me about her new job in Chicago and giving me her phone number. I phoned. After we talked for a while, she asked about her friend. I told her it was finished between her friend and me. I was seeing somebody else. She changed the subject. Every few months I get a letter from her. I write to her also. Someday, if I happen to be in Chicago, I’ll visit her.’