The Collected Stories Page 8

  “I know. I can tell.”

  “Of course. Phillip, listen. The first time Marjorie and I went out we went to a movie. I don’t remember what was playing. At any rate, I put my arm around her and my hand fell on her breast. She didn’t say anything. She trembled. At first, Phillip, I didn’t notice where my hand had fallen. Then I felt her trembling and I noticed. I trembled. I was a hand. She was a breast. I don’t have to tell you what a trembling breast feels like.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “I’ve gone too far now to stop.”

  “No more about the breast.”

  “If I stop I’ll be like Satan floating in space or Macbeth on his way to stab Duncan. Imagine if they had stopped. They would have felt like creeps. It’s the kind of thing, Phillip, you have to get over with.”

  “Get it over with. You trembled, she trembled.”

  “I was a hand. She was a breast. One day, not much later, I touched her you know where and said, ‘You tremble.’ I told her I noticed and wondered if she noticed. More than that, I wondered if she noticed that I noticed. Never in my life was I so sincerely concerned about anything. It was a feeling. Do you follow me, Phillip? I knew immediately it was a feeling. Clear, authentic, like you standing here this minute. You’re standing here, right? Nothing less. That’s how this was. Nothing less.”

  “I see. What happened?”

  “Phillip, I could spring up on her like an Irish setter and she wouldn’t notice unless I called it to her attention.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say what you think. Say whatever you think.”

  “You lost your connection with the elemental life, is that it?”

  “You could say that.”

  “At least you have dialogue, Henry. Where’s Marjorie, by the way? I don’t see her anywhere.”

  “Do you see that door? Go through it, you’ll find her.”

  I looked at the door. It had a quality of shutness. I looked at Henry’s face. It had the same quality, something vertical and shut, like the face of a mountain. Impassive, forbidding, beckoning, irresistible. Susceptibilities in my hands and feet became agitated.

  “I won’t go through any doors, Henry.”

  “I wouldn’t have talked about this with anyone but you, Phillip.”

  “I’m flattered, but not another word, please.”

  “In that room, Phillip, in the dark, in a corner …”

  “I’m leaving now.”

  I glanced away. He glanced after me. He arrived, I was gone. I turned back and looked him directly around the eyes, a swimming look. He tried to pierce it but wallowed. His eyes flailed for a grip but I widened my focus. “Phillip,” he cried, “go speak to her. Tell her my love.”

  “Ech,” I said. “I knew it would come to this. Tell her yourself. I’m going.”

  “Go. You have no right to go, but go. I’ve told you everything. Take it. Throw it in a sewer someplace.”

  “Be reasonable. What can I say to her?”

  “Don’t play stupid. You and she had plenty to say to each other before I came along. Say anything, just make her come out or let me come in.”

  “Henry.”

  “You owe me this. I’ll never feel it’s over between you unless you do it. Make her call me in there.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Then I’ll know what it means and I’ll kill you. To me the connection between love and death is very close.”

  “Henry.”

  His hand clutched my elbow like the claw of an angry bird. He walked me to the door.

  “Henry, what can I do?”

  “You know what.”

  He opened the door and shoved me through it. The door shut and I was in such darkness that I staggered and swayed. The sound of clinking glasses and talking trickled in after me, but I felt no relation to it. I was steeped, immobilized, wrapped up tight as a mummy. I was without head or arms or feet and my brain was suspended like a cloud. “Marjorie,” I said. My voice whooshed away. No answer came. I crooned, “Marjorie, it’s Phillip.” A hiss cut the dark and there was a rough scratching like scales on rocks. “Marjorie,” I crooned again, bending slowly until my hands touched the floor. “It’s Phillip. I know you’re there.” I was on my hands and knees, whispering, urgent and conspiratorial. I leaned forward and put out my hand, letting it drift into the blackness like a little boat. I heard breathing. My hand drifted into it. My eyes bulged. I leaned after my hand, saw nothing, but smelled her very close and felt her heat on my face. The hiss came again. My hand drifted farther into the darkness, my fingertips quivering, quickening to the shape, the texture, the person of Marjorie. There was a slash. My hand snapped back.

  “Don’t try that again, jackass,” she said.

  “My hand is bleeding.”

  “Good.”

  “Henry has a lot of friends out there, Marjorie. Why don’t you step outside for a moment and slash them up?”

  “Give me your hand.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Give it to me. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  My hand drifted forward. She took it in both of hers and licked it.

  “Better?”

  “Feels all right.”

  I started to draw my hand back again. She hissed, clutched it tightly. I dragged. She wrapped herself around it, shimmied up my arm and hung from my shoulder like a bunch of bananas. She whimpered in my ear, “Phillip, I’m miserable.”

  I patted her knee with my free hand. She tightened her grip with her legs and pressed her face into my neck.

  “It’s not me they’ll meet if I go out there. Not the me I am.”

  I felt sexual irritation and started patting her harder.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Phillip, when I woke up this morning there was something lying right beside me. You know what?”

  “What?” I said, patting, patting. “Henry?”

  “Me. Stretched out right beside me and staring at me in such a sad way.”

  “It’s the Zeitgeist, Marjorie.”

  Blood stopped flowing in my arm. I tried to move it. She squeezed.

  “Me,” she said. “I want me, me, me.”

  I tried to shrug her off but it was like trying to shrug off a big wart. I smeared her against the floor, got up, and smeared her against a wall. She clung like my head on my neck, my foot on my leg. I rolled, rammed into tables and chairs. She clung. I leaped up and came down on her. She clung. She gnawed my neck, nibbled, licked, squeezed. I stopped and lay still. I tried to think, but darkness seeped into my ideas, clogged the parts and connections with heavy, impenetrable scum. Her fingers and toes worked into me like worms, coiling around tendons and bones. I could tell she was nervous and said, “Marjorie, as long as I’m here why don’t you tell me what’s wrong. I’ll listen. Something wrong between you and Henry, for example?”

  “There’s nothing wrong.”

  “Is it this party? Don’t you like this party?”

  “I love it.”

  “But there is something wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  Instinctively, I wanted to punch her in the head. I said, “Marjorie, for all I care you can fester in here. Let me go.”

  She licked and squeezed.

  “If you don’t let go I’ll punch you in the head.”

  She plunged her tongue into my ear. I breathed hard. Glaciers streamed down my face. Suddenly we heard footsteps approach the door and both of us lay still.

  “You ask me what’s modern,” said a man. “No one feels anymore. That’s modern.”

  Earrings tinkled as if a head were being shaken violently. A necklace rattled. “But I feel you can’t say that,” cried a girl. “I feel there are a lot of feelings today, feelings we feel deeply and that’s why it feels as if we don’t. I couldn’t dance otherwise. How could I dance if I didn’t? Answer that.”

  For a moment there was silence. Then the man spoke again, his voice dismal and pinched as
if he had a finger in one nostril.

  “Feel shmeel.”

  Marjorie whispered, “You feel, don’t you?”

  “I feel,” I said, “but this is life. Who feels?” I thrashed. She clutched and bit. I collapsed and lay still. There was a bump against the door, hard rubbing, then a kick.

  “Don’t touch me,” said a girl. “Look what you did to my dress. I think you suffer from jugular peacocks.”

  Others came by, stopped.

  “Miss Genitalia, I’d like you to meet Miss Gapegunda.”

  “I’m sure she’ll come back, Max. It’s not like her to run out. She doesn’t have carfare.”

  “If she comes back I’ll spit in her face.”

  Marjorie was breathing as if she were asleep. I listened to her and to the people who came by and stopped outside the door.

  “What you said, Irma, makes a lot of sense,” said a man.

  “I was just talking.”

  “But very intelligently.”

  “You can’t mean that. I was talking, that’s all. If you don’t talk at these parties they think you’re a fool.”

  “I do mean it. I’d like you to write it all up and submit it to my journal. Do you write German?”

  Another man wheezed.

  “Shut up, sweetheart. All right? Just once you shut up, all right? It’s not so much to ask, is it? I say yes, you say no. I say no, you say yes. Why don’t you write a book and shut up? Write one of mine in reverse. Where I say no you say yes.”

  “Fuck you, Ned.”

  Marjorie was asleep, wrapped around my arm like ten snakes. I moved a little. She constricted and said, “Nya, nya.”

  I lay still again and gaped into the darkness. It was important to think. I had a sense of the problematic towering above me in the darkness like a Gothic cathedral. Complex, violent, full of contradictions like the hairdo of a madwoman. I fell asleep. In my sleep I heard a knock at the door. It came drifting over waters like Noah’s dove, little gray wings knocking through fog. It came closer, closer. I cried, “Here, little dovey.” It went by, knocking dimly away into the fog.

  “Phillip,” said Henry.

  I yelled in my dream, “Henureee.”

  Marjorie woke up, hissed, “Don’t answer.”

  I tried to wake up.

  “Phillip, you there? Who’s there?”

  Marjorie began moving all over me. She ripped open my shirt. She scraped off my shoes with her toes. I woke up as my zipper went down like a slashed throat. She wrenched under me. I said, “Love.” She yelled and pummeled my back as if sending messages to friends across the veldt. “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “I like it, I like it,” she yelled.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Who’s in there?” said Henry.

  “Don’t come in,” I said.

  His footsteps went away.

  Marjorie went limp, her arms outflopped, languid as lily stalks.

  “Finish,” she said.

  Her legs fell apart as if cleaved by an ax.

  “Hurry,” she said.

  I hurried. Footsteps came back to the door. There was a knock.

  “Marjorie,” said Henry. “Was that you in there?”

  I hurried.

  “Wait for me,” she said. “Slow down.”

  “Of course,” said Henry. “You know I will.”

  I slowed down.

  “Do it,” she said.

  “I won’t move an inchy winchy until you tell me to.” He made a kissing against the door.

  “Up and down, up and down,” she said.

  “Ha, ha,” said Henry. He jumped up and down, up and down. “Like this?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Nee, nee, nee he laughed. “Here I go up and down, up and down,” he sang. “I’m skipping rope.”

  “Now,” she yelled.

  “Now?” said Henry. “Di oo say now now?”

  “Wow, wow,” she said.

  “Marjorie,” I said.

  “Henry,” she screamed.

  He flung open the door. I was behind it. He laughed nee, nee, jumped up and down, and came skipping into the room. I flew out. His knees struck the floor like cannonballs.

  “Marjorie,” he said.

  “Love.”

  I got my flowers and wine and slipped out into the night. It was moonless and cold. I slipped into it nose first. It nosed into me. I twitched like a fish and went quivering through dingy dingles, from blackness to blackness to blackness to blackness.

  Isaac

  TALMUDIC SCHOLAR, MASTER OF CABALA, Isaac felt vulnerable to a thousand misfortunes in New York, slipped on an icy street, lay on his back, and wouldn’t reach for his hat. People walked, traffic screamed, freezing damp sucked through his clothes. He let his eyes fall shut — no hat, no freezing, no slip, no street, no New York, no Isaac — and got a knock against the soles of his shoes. It shook his teeth. His eyes flashed open, darkness spread above him like a predatory tree, a dozen buttons glared, and a sentence flew out, beak and claws, with a quality of moral sophistication indistinguishable from hatred: “What’s-a-matta, fuckhead, too much vino?” He’d never heard of vino, but had a feeling for syntax — fuckhead was himself. He said, “Eat pig shit,” the cop detected language, me-it became I-thou and the air between them a warm, viable medium. He risked English: “I falled on dot ice, tenk you.”

  The man in the next bed wasn’t alive. Gray as a stone, hanging over the edge of the mattress, the head was grim to consider. But only a fool points out the obvious; Isaac wouldn’t tell a nurse. Even so, he couldn’t dismiss a head upside down, staring at him, and found himself crying. He had traveled thousands of miles to fall down like a fuckhead and lie beside a corpse. Crying loosened muscles. His shoulders began moving. Shoulders moving, he discovered arms moving, and if arms, why not legs? In his left leg moved thunder and lightning. But he sat up and shouted, “Sitting!” A nurse ripped open his pajamas and shoved in a bedpan. “I appreciate,” he said, and defecated.

  Before dawn he had dressed himself and was in the street. Stumbling, pressing into the dark as if pursued by dogs. More and more he tilted left and thus, beneath horrible pain, felt horrible geometry. His left leg was shorter than his right. He pressed into a phone booth. His sister screamed when she heard his voice. He told her what happened and she screamed, “Don’t move.” He sat in the booth, fell asleep, there was a knock and his eyes opened. She looked through the glass. “Katya,” he said, “like a coffin.” She wouldn’t discuss the idea. Neither would Chaim, her husband, or Fagel, her husband’s sister, or hunchback Yankel, the peddler, who asked where Isaac felt pain. In the back? In the leg? He remembered a fall in which he hurt his knee. Did Isaac’s knee hurt? No? Very strange. How did a scholar, he wondered, fall in the street like an animal; but then what’s one leg shorter compared to a brain concussion with blood bulging from the eyes? No comparison. Lucky Isaac. Isaac winked, made a little lucky nod, and collapsed. Fagel screamed. Katya screamed. Chaim gave Isaac his umbrella. Isaac pressed it with one hand. The other pressed his sister’s arm. They went down the street together — Isaac, Katya, Fagel, Chaim, Yankel. Cracow, the chiropractor, had an office nearby.

  To keep his mind off his stumbling torture, Katya told Isaac about Moisse, who wasn’t lucky. He came to New York sponsored by a diamond merchant, friend of politicians, bon vivant, famous for witty exegeses of the Talmud. “So?” So as a condition of sponsorship, Moisse promised never to abandon, in New York, any tradition of the faith. He imagined no circumstances in which he might, but married, opened a dry-goods store, and had a son. Circumstances arose in doctor bills. He had to do business on Saturdays. Isaac licked his lips. Chaim punched his chest. Yankel shrugged his hunch. “So?” So it followed like the manifestation in the garden, that the merchant’s beard hung in the door one Saturday. — You know what day this is, Moisse? What could he say? Isaac said, “Nothing. What could he say?” Chaim punched, Yankel shrugged. The beard nodded. The mouth hacked up a
spittle, the spittle smacked the floor, and the baby son was discovered on the prostrate body of his mother, shrieking like a demon while he ate the second nipple. Now Moisse doesn’t do business on Saturday. His worst enemies won’t say he isn’t a saint.

  “You got another story?”

  “It’s the only story I know.”

  “Tell me again,” said Isaac.

  Before she finished they were inside an old brownstone, looking up a high, narrow stairway. She tugged at the umbrella, but Isaac only looked, as if they were stairs in a dream. To be looked at, nothing else. What can you do in a dream? She tugged. He fell against a wall. She went up alone and came down with, “Dr. Cracow says.” Isaac must walk up and lie facedown on the chiropractor table. Otherwise go away and shrivel. In a week his leg would be a raisin. He could look forward to carrying it in his armpit. Fagel screamed, Chaim punched. They walked up.

  Cracow stood suddenly erect, as if, the instant before, he had touched his toes. His fingers were stiff, quivering like the prongs of a rake. He nodded to the table. Isaac dropped onto it as if into an abyss and Cracow pummeled him from neck to tail, humming: “Muss es sein. Es muss sein,” then said, “Get up.” With dreamlike speed they were at the brink of the stairs. A thing whooshed by, cracked, clattered to the landing.“Get it,” said Cracow.

  Isaac shook his head.

  “Isaac, get it,” said Katya. Chaim said, “Get it.” Yankel said, “Get it, get it.”

  The umbrella was a streak of wood and cloth in another world. Isaac shook his head at the possibility of getting it. Beyond that, not getting it. Shaking his head, he started down. Not with delicate caution, like a man just crippled, but mechanical exactitude, like a man long crippled. Even in the bones of former incarnations, crippled, resigned to a thousand strictures. Cracow hummed, Isaac descended. Every step an accident succeeding an accident in a realm where perfection was grotesque. Cracow said, “No pain?”

  Isaac stopped, gazed out; then, carefully, into his own center. Pain? His whole being was a question. It trembled toward yes or no and, like music, yes, very slightly, yes, he felt himself lift and fly above the stairs. Then he settled like dust. Cracow’s voice shot through the air: “Six dollars, please.” Isaac turned to fly up to him. With four wings clapping he was struck by stairs, smacked by walls, stopped by the ultimate, unyielding floor. He lay on his back. His eyes fell shut. Thumps accumulated down the stairs. Katya screamed. Yankel shrugged, Chaim whispered, “Dead?” Fagel screamed, Cracow said, “Could be dead.” Chaim said, “Dead?” Fagel screamed, Katya screamed. “Dead? Dead?” said Yankel. Chaim said, “Not alive,” and Yankel said, “Dead.” Fagel screamed, screamed, screamed, screamed, screamed.