The Collected Stories Read online

  They rushed after me into my room. Larry, still thrashing, was sliding up the wall against his back, as if to escape a snake on his mattress. His face was blue. Bloody foam was running down his neck. Someone said, “He’s swallowing his tongue. Do something.” I saw a comb on the window ledge above Larry’s bed and snatched it. Two guys seized Larry’s arms and forced him down flat onto the bed. I straddled his chest and pried his mouth open with the edge of the comb, clenching it in my fists at either end. I said, “Open, open, open,” as I forced the edge of the comb between his teeth, trying to press his tongue down. He went limp abruptly. The guys let go of his arms. I slid off his chest. We backed away. His head rolled to one side, then slowly to the other, as if to shake away the seizure. He opened his eyes, seeing, and said, “What?” The word was dim, from far away. I said, “Are you all right, Larry? You had a seizure.”

  “When?”

  I took over his station at dinner, waiting his tables. Busboys came shooting from nearby stations to clear dishes, doing double work. We’d have done the same at breakfast, but he insisted on returning to his station. He made it through the day with no help. That night, in the casino bar, drinking beers, he said he felt fine. He didn’t remember the seizure. I described it to him, feeling nervous and guilty, as if I shouldn’t be telling him this about himself. He said it had happened before. Only his parents knew.

  “I’m worried,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “Hairy Murray the tummler is driving up to play handball tomorrow afternoon.”

  “You’re worried about that? Call off the game.”

  “I’ll rip his head off.”

  “Sure. But not tomorrow.”

  “I put money down.”

  “Forfeit. Tell him you’re sick. Hairy Murray doesn’t need your money. He’ll let you keep it.”

  “He hangs out with hard guys. He won’t let me keep one cent. It’s a question of honor.”

  “It’s a question of you being sick.”

  “I can play.”

  “You want to be king of the little black ball.”

  “Yeah.”

  We sat for a while in silence. Then I said, “Because of Sheila?”

  “That’s over.”

  “Yesterday you were fixing me up with her sister, the great chemist.”

  “I phoned Sheila last night. I told her what happened and said to stay out of my life.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She was crying.”

  “I’m sorry. So why are you playing?”

  “I want to win.”

  “You want to lose.”

  “If I need a psychiatrist, I’ll give you a ring.”

  “Do that. I’ll have you put in a straitjacket. You had a fit right in my face. El gran mambo.”

  Hairy Murray arrived like a boxer, with an entourage. He was on the short side, with a thick neck, wide and deeply sloping shoulders, and short arms. He wore a white linen suit, white shoes, and sunglasses. He looked tropical. When he stepped out of his Cadillac, he began limping heavily toward the handball court, then, suddenly, he became a blind man, walking in the wrong direction. His entourage, five guys in flashy gabardine slacks, were laughing their heads off. The dining-room and kitchen staff were already in the stands, along with the musicians and a lot of the guests. When people arrived from other resorts, they sat on the grass. Everyone knew about Larry’s seizure. It made the game more interesting.

  Hairy Murray waved to the crowd, then began to strip. One of the gabardine men held his shorts and sneakers. It was another joke, changing in public. When Hairy Murray dropped his pants, he snapped them back up again instantly. He had no underwear. He pretended to be confused, shamed by his forgetfulness. Everyone had seen his big cock slop free of his pants. Men cheered and booed. Women stared wildly at each other, smiling with disgust. Hairy Murray’s entourage, virtually in tears, was laughing as they made a circle around him, shielding him from view while he changed.

  Larry ignored the spectacle and warmed up, serving the ball to himself, slamming righty, then lefty. He looked thoughtful, faintly slower. He wouldn’t even glance at Hairy Murray, whose legs, arms, back, and neck were covered with black hair. A gold Star of David, on a fine gold chain, floated on the black sea of chest hair. I thought maybe he would beat Larry. A man couldn’t have so much hair without being exceptionally gifted. His arms were stumpy but looked powerful. The question was, could he move fast? Larry’s hope was to hit wide angles, make Hairy Murray chase the ball.

  The coin was tossed. Larry called tails. It came down tails. Hairy Murray quit joking, took his position on the court, and braced to receive the first serve, a tremendous boom off the board, speeding back low and at a wide angle to the left sideline. Hairy Murray was after it with a blur of short steps. He sent the ball back with the least flick of his left wrist, a soft, high lob. Larry went drifting to the end line, where he returned hard, but no slam was possible. They played even for seventeen points. Neither was clearly superior. Then Hairy Murray served, won four straight points, and the game was over. There wasn’t a sound from the stands and nobody moved to pay off bets. Hairy Murray said, “Double or nothing?”

  Larry shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll spot you the four points you lost and triple the bet.”

  “Thanks, no.”

  “You don’t have the cash?”

  “Not today.”

  “You’ll owe me.”

  “You want to play me that bad?”

  “I want to kill you.” He said this smiling.

  Larry looked vague, as if he didn’t remember he was a Teutonic barbarian, handball ace, mambo genius, future dentist, and the man Sheila Kahn had been smitten by so hard it ruined her life. I wanted to go to the bunkhouse, go to sleep. Seeing him like this was a kind of betrayal. Nameless, creepy feelings swarmed about my heart. I wished I could shoot him and put an end to my feelings. I wished he would say goodbye, go. He couldn’t say anything, and couldn’t go. He bounced the ball, caught it, bounced it. Hairy Murray put his hands on his hips, waiting, patience and contempt in his posture.

  Then another man walked out on the court. A bald man, so much the opposite of Hairy Murray, he looked like his taller brother. It was Morris Kahn. I hadn’t noticed him arrive. “Take the bet,” he said. “I’ll cover it.” Morris looked haggard, with dark, puffy crescents under his eyes.

  Hairy Murray said, “Hey, Starker, you hear this cat?”

  “I don’t want to lose your money,” said Larry to Morris.

  “So don’t lose it.” Morris’s voice was quick and definitive. “Do you think I drove up here, two hours from the city, to see a loser?”

  Hairy Murray, grinning, said, “Four points, kid. Beat me.” He twitched faintly, enough to suggest epilepsy, then grinned, holding his hands out, palms up, to suggest no harm intended. Morris said, “Chazzer fisl kosher,” meaning, more or less, Hairy Murray is a pig showing us clean little feet. Hairy Murray laughed, exhibiting every tooth and a flare of crimson gums. In his thickness and vigor, he was pleased; didn’t feel injured. Smiling at Larry, he said, “What’s shaking, baby? You’ll take a four-point spot?”

  He looked at Morris; said nothing.

  “A four-point spot is for losers,” said Morris. “Larry plays even. Double or nothing.” Morris reached into his pants pocket, came up with a quarter, tossed it high, and said, “Call, Larry.” The coin hit the ground and rolled away too far to make out how it landed. Hairy Murray looked at Larry and said, “Nu, boychick, you call it, or I’ll call it.”

  Larry said, “Tails.” I heard a sort of keening in his voice, high and miserable. It came from neither fear nor defiance, but, like the wind of Golgotha, from desolation. In that instant, I knew the difference between winners and losers has no relation to talent or beauty or personal will, what athletes call “desire,” but only to a will beyond ourselves. Larry had just established his connection to it. If I weren’t exceedingly frugal
, I’d have bet every cent I made that summer on Larry. He slipped off his wristwatch and T-shirt, handed them to me, then returned to the court. His eyes were lonely, remotely seeing, unlike the blind man a day ago, torso electrified and thrashing. Charged with cold control, he looked grim and invincible. I wasn’t the only one who felt it. People were making new bets even before the first serve. Hairy Murray took in the change. He chuckled, as if he’d thought of something funny but decided not to say it. I think he felt fear. Between himself and Larry, the air had become glass. Hairy Murray would play against himself, his limits.

  Morris went to the coin to see how it lay. He said, “Larry serves.” Morris then picked up the coin and walked off the court, returning to the stands, where he’d left his newspaper. He began reading as he had that morning in the dining room. The moments of the game were of no concern.

  Larry bent low to serve. His long naked arm swept back, then flashed forward. He slapped the ball, and it boomed off the wood face of the backboard. Hairy Murray returned boom for boom. Larry then hit a killer. Murray couldn’t return it without tearing his knuckles on the concrete. He let it go. Larry served again, stronger, faster. Near the end of the game, Morris looked up from his newspaper. There was no excitement in his eyes and hardly much interest. He looked back at the newspaper, its bad news. From the way his shoulders slumped, I felt his resignation. Larry won by eleven points. People were counting money, passing it back and forth. Morris put the paper down. His expression was tired and neither pleased nor displeased. He rose and walked toward Larry.

  What Morris and Sheila had said to each other can’t be known, but I imagined fifty conversations, how Sheila called Morris after Larry told her to stay out of his life, how she cried. It was inconceivable that she had asked Morris to help her with Larry, but I knew she had. Morris must have loved her a lot. In his pain and disappointment, he drove up from the city to talk to Larry and heard about the game. Afterward, he and Larry walked away together. Morris’s round, youthful face was turned toward Larry. Larry stared at the ground. Their conversation was brief. Morris extended his hand. Larry extended his. I didn’t want to watch them and walked away to the bunkhouse, carrying Larry’s T-shirt bunched up in my fist with the watch.

  A few days later, the season ended, and the dining-room staff went home. I didn’t go out on any double dates with Larry. I didn’t see him again until three summers later. I’d been promoted to waiter at the honeymoon resort. Larry appeared in the casino bar one night, drinking alone. He wore a dark blue suit, white-on-white shirt with sapphire-studded cuff links, and a yellow silk tie. He looked elegant as a gangster. In his chest and face, he was slightly heavier. “Larry Starker,” I said. He looked at me without a word as he shook my hand, offering only a little smile, as if he were remembering his opinion of me.

  “Sigmund Freud, right?”

  The hotel tummler, master of ceremonies at the resort, thrust between us before we could talk, slapping Larry on the shoulder, saying, “Let’s go, Doctor. Where’s the wife?” Walking away, Larry glanced at me and said, “Hang around. Come backstage later.” Then the tummler was onstage, introducing a dance team. They had won a Latin dance contest in Brooklyn and were touring the Catskills. “Larry, the dentist, and beautiful Sheila. Give these kids a hand.”

  The first number, a triple mambo, was wild with congas, bongos, and timbales. Cowbells were clanging, gidong-gidong-gidong-dong. The beat could make dancers look frantic, but Larry and Sheila were smooth and cool. Him in his dark suit and yellow tie. She in spike heels and a black, supremely elegant cocktail dress. A moment ago, she might have been sipping an exquisitely dry martini. In the stage light, in this music, they were king and queen. I ached with admiration and primitive envy, and applauded madly. Afterward in a room backstage, I shook hands with Larry again, told him he and Sheila were fantastic, and reminded him that I’d once been his busboy.

  He said, “I know.”

  “I’m waiting table now. Our old station.”

  To my own ears, I sounded a little false, pressing our connection too happily. My feelings were impure. I’d never actually been able to love him as a friend. He introduced me to Sheila, his wife, and said she was almost four months pregnant. It didn’t show. She sat in a folding chair, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.

  I said, “Hi.”

  She said, “Hi.”

  I didn’t feel invited to step closer and shake her hand, but she nodded to me with an empty smile, then looked at Larry. The moment was strangely awkward, nobody saying anything. I felt intrusive. Then Larry said he had his dental degree.

  “Not everyone in my class made it. You need hand-eye coordination. Like a fighter pilot. You’re always looking in a tiny mirror to see what your hands are doing — in reverse — inside somebody’s mouth.”

  “Are you still playing handball?”

  Sheila’s father had bought him into an office in Brighton Beach, he said, walking distance to the handball courts, but he didn’t play much. He was too busy, too tired at the end of the day. Then he talked about their dance routine.

  “We’re working a story into it. The man dances in place. He is almost motionless. The woman dances for his pleasure, like she is exhibiting herself. He watches, but still dancing in place. Suspense is building, building, until the woman can’t hold back, can’t stay away. She goes to him. It’s a chase, but different.”

  He worked himself up as he talked, and began to clap out the clave rhythm—1, 2, 3–1, 2—doing the steps in place, carrying himself like a tall, smooth, arrogant seducer. Sheila, sitting in her chair, watched with no expression until she realized he was seriously involved in the routine and expected her to join him. She said, “Aw, Larry. Enough already. I just finished dancing my ass off.”

  Larry looked good, even when almost motionless; he had the music inside him. He ignored her protest, and kept dancing in place, clapping out the clave sharp and loud, and he raised an eyebrow the least degree, and faintly, he curled his lip. Barbarian lights flashed in his teeth. He said, “Dance, bitch.”

  Sheila sighed, dropped her cigarette on the floor, looked down, and stepped on it. She looked back up at him with the face of a sweet, pathetic dummy and whimpered, “No.”

  Larry kept on dancing, clapping out the beat, staring at her. The tension was unbearable. I wanted to say, “I’ll see you two do it another time,” or, “Leave her alone,” but I didn’t know if I was looking at a dance routine or real life. As if in a trance, Sheila was then rising from her chair, beginning to move toward Larry, tentatively, moving to the beat in a deliberately broken, mechanical way. She said, “No,” once more, but was now very close to him, face to face, then leaning into him, pressing against his chest. He had stopped clapping, and they were pressed flat together from chest to thigh, dancing. There was silence in the room, except for the rhythm of their feet sliding along the floor, perfectly together.

  As I watched, gooseflesh swept along my arms, like a breeze across the surface of a Catskill lake. At the bottom of the lake, in the shimmering murk, I made out Larry Starker, ankles chained to cinder blocks, straight blond hair streaming up, wavy in the water, slow as smoke. His arms were flailing at his sides. There was a bullet hole in his forehead.

  A Girl With a Monkey

  IN THE SPRING of the year following his divorce, while traveling alone in Germany, Beard fell in love with a young prostitute named Inger and canceled his plans for further travel. They spent two days together, mainly in Beard’s room. He took her to restaurants for lunch and dinner. The third day Inger told Beard she needed a break. She had a life before Beard arrived. Now she had only Beard. She reminded him that the city was famous for its cathedral and zoo. “You should go look. There is more to see than Inger Stutz.” Besides, she’d neglected her chores, and missed a dental appointment as well as classes in paper restoration at the local museum.

  When she mentioned the classes, Beard thought to express interest, ask questions about paper restoration, but
he wasn’t interested. He said, “You could miss a few more.” His tone was glum. He regretted it, but felt justified because she’d hurt his feelings. He’d spent a lot of money on Inger. He deserved better. He wasn’t her life, but he’d canceled his plans, and he wouldn’t be staying forever. She didn’t have to remind him of the cathedral and zoo. Such things had been noted in his travel itinerary by the agent in San Francisco. He also had a travel guide.

  Beard had in fact planned to do a lot of sightseeing, but moments after he checked into his hotel there was a knock at the door and he supposed it was a bellhop or chambermaid, and he saw the girl. She was very apologetic and apparently distressed. She’d come to the wrong room. Beard was charmed, not deceived. He invited her in.

  Now, the evening of the third day, Beard said, “I don’t want to hear about your chores or classes.” He would double her fee.

  Beard wasn’t rich, but he’d inherited money and the court excluded his inheritance from the divorce settlement. It was enough money to let him be expansive, if not extravagant. He’d quit his job in television production in San Francisco and gone to the travel agent. The trip cost plenty, but having met Inger and fallen in love, he was certainly getting value for his money until she said, “Please don’t tell me what I could do or could not do. And it isn’t a question of money.”

  The remark was inconsistent with her profession, even if Inger was still young, only a semi-pro, but it was the way she said “could,” exactly as Beard had said it, that bothered him. He detected hostility in her imitation, and he was afraid that he’d underestimated Inger, maybe provoked a distaste for his character that was irredeemable.