The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (16 page)

I decide to give the man next to me the benefit of the doubt, and I tell him how long I’ve been running. “Oh?” he says. “That’s funny. You should be used to it by now.” And he steps out on the track again.

I step out, too, to run, but I find that I can’t, and lock into a standstill at the inside of the track, although stopping on the track is, for good reason, absolutely forbidden. My visual field—a wheel of thundering men encircling a space through which little red and blue and green girls are flying—tilts and spins, as in a film.

The man passes me once, twice, three times. He knows that I am there, but he won’t look at me. The fourth time he goes by, my hand shoots out and grabs his arm. I glimpse the lawyer I know looking surprised, but not surprised enough for me. “What did you mean, I should be used to it?” I ask the man in my grasp. My hands are shaking. “Oh, not really anything,” he says. His tone is careful. “You must have meant something”—I speak slowly, with admirable self-control—“and I wonder what it was you did mean.”

“I’ll tell you,” he says. “I want to finish running first, and then I’ll talk to you.” He breaks away. I wait. I keep waiting, and the man keeps running. He’s obviously quite tired, but he’s too alarmed to stop. When he gets a bit blue around the edges, I thread my way off the track, stand for a minute out of sight on the stairwell, and then peek back out, catching the eye of my man, who is now walking, to show him that he need not think I’m gone. He starts to run again. Satisfied, I go down to the locker room.

At a locker near mine, a blond woman with a nice atmosphere whom I have often seen on the track is changing her clothes. I tell her what has just happened to me.

“What a drip,” she says. “Most people here aren’t like that at all. I bet you felt like picking him up by his feet and smashing his head on the track,” she says in her pleasant voice, pulling up her socks.

“Gee, I feel awful,” I say, and sniffle.

“Me too,” she says. “I think I’m coming down with a cold.” We go downstairs together and out into the benign evening.

My Dream

This is a dream I frequently have: I glance down at my hand. The posture I have denied it for so long, the gesture it has so often hopelessly initiated, is suddenly deliciously completed. I am holding a lit cigarette! I am now able, I reason in my dream, to display the scope of my will. I can either inhale from this cigarette in my hand or not, as I freely choose. I freely choose to inhale, and the fantasy instantly collapses; the entire mendacious simulacrum shivers and falls at my feet, leaving me—a slave who will have to smoke now, forever—in the barren waking world where it is easy to recognize the dreadful thing I had briefly mistaken for choice. Then I wake truly, empty-handed in the merciful morning.

Spring

I do three miles! At the end of my second mile, and then at the end of my second and a half, rather than feeling I am at the end of my capacity, I feel as though I have established a new relationship with my legs, and I don’t want to stop, ever. But I do at the end of three miles, anyhow, because I don’t want to hurt myself or to become a different sort of person without giving the matter proper thought.

I call up Kathy and tell her. “Hey, Kath, I ran three miles!” “Hey, wow, that’s really great!” she tells me. I try to describe the sensation I had of sudden ease and endless availability of energy. “I think that’s what they mean by a second wind,” Kathy says. “That’s why it’s possible for a person like you or me to run three or six or twenty-six miles, because you can get it over and over again.”

“Sometime I’d like to try for five miles,” I tell Kathy. “Why not?” she says, excited by the idea. “They say the first three miles are the hardest.”

The days are becoming brighter and longer. The air and the city have expanded in the warmth, and there is room to walk around. In different parts of the city, clusters of silvery buildings gleam, their surfaces reflecting clear sky and sailing clouds, and men and women stride among them, their clothing billowing like pennants. In the bright sunshine, stores spring up, windows full of gaudy running shoes. What a bore.

Tuesday

On my way to the Y I notice how hot it is. Far too hot to run. I turn around and go home, where I have things to do.

Wednesday

It is even hotter today.

Thursday

I run today, but after a mile I am ready to die of boredom and exhaustion.

During the past few weeks I’ve felt so impatient at the Y. I find that somehow I can hardly run, it is too hot to sauna, the conversations I overhear are dull and trivial, and the exercise apparatuses look dingy and foolish.

The man who gave me a hard time on the track has established residency in my mind. I discover that just as he exercises power over me, I can exercise power over him. This man in my mind may have a low opinion of me, but I can have a low opinion of him, too, if I so choose. I can have a low opinion of his low opinion of me as well. Also, I notice, I can have a high opinion of his low opinion of me, an opinion that according to this very schema is worthless. I amuse myself by raising and lowering him in my estimation and by combining in various ways, and then distinguishing between, him, his opinion of me, me, and my opinion of him.

It seems that an opinion of someone is not a serious matter.

The sun penetrates through the sky to my skin, and I blink in the light like a bear coming out of hibernation. I feel that I have been dreaming watchfully in this hibernation, my sleeping brain accounting for many passing years, and that I have awakened suddenly, shedding the strain of my dreams, to find that less time has elapsed than has been mourned in my sleep.

Years have passed, it is true, but not many, many years.

Halfway to the Y I remember that I haven’t brought my towel. I turn around and go back to the apartment. After I lock the door again, go downstairs, and proceed three or four blocks toward the Y, I remember that once again I have forgotten my towel. I can rent one at the Y, but the one I rent would not be
my
towel, which had figured (in its own small way, to be sure) in my plans for the day. I turn around, go home, hang up some clothes I had left on a chair, make the bed so I won’t get in it, and leave, locking the door and heading for the Y, forgetting, it occurs to me some few blocks later, my towel.

Clearly I am not supposed to go to the Y today. But then, what am I supposed to do? I stop to think, causing a pileup on the corner.

Back at home I sit down on the neatly made bed. I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes to clear my mental field. A little directive asserts itself. It is appearing as neatly as if it were being typed out on a fortune-cookie slip. i am hungry, it tells me, and, by gum, I
am
hungry. Today, instead of going to the Y, I will take myself out to lunch.

I allow my new skills to lead me to a restaurant. I notice with some surprise that the restaurant I have chosen is a pretentious vegetarian restaurant, crowded and uncomfortable. I consult myself and reveal that I would like soup du jour and a house salad. The soup, which I already know to be overpriced, turns out to be terrible as well. I eat it with great relish. My salad arrives, a wilting pile of vegetable parings garnished with American cheese.

“Chopsticks?” asks the waitress. I do a quick internal scan. “Yes, please.” I top off my lunch with a cup of lukewarm coffee, pay the shocking check, and ease myself out of my small torture chair, sighing with satisfaction.

At home I again ask myself what I would like to do, and again my answer arrives. I want, it appears, to write letters. Perhaps there’s been some mistake, I think. But I decide to try, and I find it is true: I do want to write letters.

It is amazing to be able to find out what I want to do at any given moment, out of what seems to be nothing, out of not knowing at all. It is secretly and individually thrilling, like being able to open my fist and release into the air a flock of white doves.

My new insight has stood the test of time. Three days have passed, and it has not faded. I call Kathy and tell her that I’ve discovered the point of life.

“Gosh!” she says. “What is it?” Kathy is always up for something new.

I tell Kathy about the point of life being to have a good time. “Gee,” says Kathy, rolling this around on her brain. “That’s very interesting. But you know,” she adds gently, “I’m not really sure that I really like having a good time, exactly.”

Naturally I have anticipated this objection. No one likes to have a good time, but this is due to a misconception as to what a good time is, or faux fun, I explain grandly. “The thing is,” I tell Kathy, “you’re the only person who can tell what it is to have a good time, and since you’re the only person who can have your own good time, whatever it is that a good time is, is what a good time is! So you can just know what it is and have it!”

“Gosh,” says Kathy. “Maybe so. I’m going to think about that.” She is feeling pretty good herself, having landed a terrific new job, which she tells me all about.

I keep expecting to wear out my new divinatory gift with gluttony, like someone who catches an enchanted fish and makes more than the allotted number of wishes, winding up with a pudding on his or her nose, or living in the pigsty, or whatnot; but it seems, on the contrary, to grow more and more reliable, and with ever-increasing frequency and rapidity I think of what I would like to do and I do it.

The days just clutter up with things I feel like doing and then do. One after another, I fill up and dispatch dayfuls of things.

Summer

I haven’t been to the Y for months, and I almost forgot about it, but this evening I pass it by on my way to dinner. It is fairly late, and many people are leaving the building, walking down the front steps alone or in twos and threes, unchaining their bicycles from the racks in front, and dispersing into the evening. I am quite a distance away, but I feel as though I can see them clearly. Their faces are calm, and they seem invigorated, as if they have been running. The evening sky is domed above the large, lit building, and more and more men and women stream through the doors, radiating outward toward the next thing they are to do, each headed, it looks from where I stand, dead on target.

I had lit a fire in my fireplace, and I’d poured out two coffees and two brandies, and I was settling down on the sofa next to a man who had taken me out to dinner when Ivan called after more than six months. I turned with the receiver to the wall as I absorbed the fact of Ivan’s voice, and when I glanced back at the man on my sofa, he seemed like a scrap of paper, or the handle from a broken cup, or a single rubber band—a thing that has become dislodged from its rightful place and intrudes on one’s consciousness two or three or many times before one understands that it is just a thing best thrown away.

“Still in Montreal?” I said into the phone.

“Yeah,” Ivan said. “I’m going to stay for a while.”

“What’s it like?” I said.

“Cold,” he said.

“It’s cold in New York, too,” I was able to answer.

“Well, when can you get here?” he said. “We’ll warm each other up.”

I’d begun to think that this time there would be no end to the waiting, but here he was, here was Ivan, dropping down into my life again and severing the fine threads I’d spun out toward the rest of the world.

“I can’t just leave,” I said. “I have a job, you know.”

“They’ll give you a few weeks, won’t they?” he said. “Over Christmas?”

“A few weeks,” I said, but when he was silent I was sorry I’d said it.

“We’ll talk it all over when you get up here,” he said finally. “I know it’s hard. It’s hard for me, too.”

I turned slightly, to face the window. The little plant that sat on the sill was almost leafless, I noticed, and paint was peeling slightly from the ceiling above it. How had I made myself believe this apartment was my home? This apartment was nothing.

“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll come.”

I replaced the receiver, but the man on the sofa just sat and moved his spoon back and forth in his cup of coffee with a little chiming sound.

“An old friend,” I said.

“So I assumed,” he said.

“Well,” I said, but then I couldn’t even remember why that man was there. “I think I’d better say good night.”

The man stood. “Going on a trip?”

“Soon,” I said.

“Well, give me a call when you get back,” he said. “If you want to.”

“I’m not sure that I’ll be coming back,” I said.

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he said, nodding, as if I were telling him a long story. “Well, then, good luck.”

I flew up early one morning, leaving my apartment while it was still dark outside. I had packed, and flooded my plant with water in a hypocritical gesture that would delay, but not prevent, its death, and then I’d sat waiting for the clock face to arrive at the configuration that meant it was time I could reasonably go.

The airport was shaded and still in the pause before dawn, and the scattering of people there seemed to have lived for days in flight’s distended light or dark; for them, this stop was no more situated in space than a dream is.

How many planes and buses and trains I had taken, over the years, to see Ivan! And how inevitable it always felt, as if I were being conveyed to him by some law of the universe made physical.

We’d met when I was nineteen, in Atlanta, where I was working for a photographic agency. He lived with his wife, Linda, who had grown up there, and their one-year-old, Gary. But he traveled frequently, and when he would call and ask me to go with him or meet him for a weekend somewhere—well, Ivan was one of those men, and just standing next to him I felt as if I were standing in the sun, and it never occurred to me to hesitate or to ask any questions.

And Ivan warmed with me. After their early marriage, Linda had grown increasingly fearful and demanding, he told me, and years of trying to work things out with her had imposed on him the cautious reserve of an unwilling guardian. It was a habit he seemed eager to discard.

After a time, there was a divorce, and Ivan moved about from place to place, visiting and taking photographs, and I got a job in New York. But he would call, and I would lock the door of whatever apartment I was living in and go to him in strange cities, leaving each before I could break through the transparent covering behind which it lay, mysterious and inert. And I always felt the same when I saw Ivan—like an animal raised in captivity that, after years of caged, puzzled solitude, is instantly recalled by the touch of a similar creature to the natural blazing consciousness of its species.

The last time we were together, though, we had lain on a slope overlooking a sunny lake, and a stem trembled in my hand while I explained, slowly and quietly, that it would not do any longer. I was twenty-eight now, I said, and he would have to make some sort of decision about me.

“Are you talking about a decision that can be made honestly?” He held my chin up and looked into my eyes.

“That is what a decision is,” I said. “If the next step is self-evident, we don’t call it a decision.”

“I don’t want to be unfair,” he said, finally. And I came to assume, because I hadn’t heard from him since, that the decision had been made.

Soft winter light was rolling up onto the earth as the plane landed, and the long corridors of the airport reflected a mild, dark glow.

An official opened my suitcase and turned over a stack of my underpants.
SOMETHING TO DECLARE…NOTHING TO DECLARE
, I saw on signs overhead, and strange words below each message. Oh, yes—part of this city was English-speaking, part French-speaking. A sorry-looking Christmas wreath hung over the lobby, and I thought of something Ivan had said after one of his frequent trips to see Gary and Linda in Atlanta: “I can’t really have much sympathy for her. When she senses I’m not as worried about her as she’d like me to be, she takes a slight, semiaccidental overdose of something or gets herself into a little car crash.”

“She loves you that much?” I asked.

“It isn’t love,” he said. “For all her dependence, she doesn’t love me.”

“But,” I said, “is that what she thinks? Does she think she loves you that much?”

He stood up and stretched, and for a moment I thought that he hadn’t registered my question. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what she thinks.”

Near the airport exit, there was a currency-exchange bureau, and I understood that I would need new money. The man behind the cage counted out the variegated, colorful Canadian bills in front of me. “Ah,” he said, noticing my expression—he spoke with a faint but unfamiliar accent—“an unaccustomed medium of exchange, yes?”

I was directed by strangers to a little bus that took me across a plain to the city, a stony outcropping perched at the cold top of the world. There were solitary houses, heavy in the shallow film of light, and rows of low buildings, and many churches. I found a taxi and circumvented the question of language by handing the driver a piece of paper with Ivan’s address on it, and I was brought in silence to a dark, muscular Victorian house that loomed from a brick street in a close row with others of its kind.

Ivan came downstairs bringing the morning gold with him and let me in. His skin and hair were wheat and honey colors, and he smelled as if he had been sleeping in a sunny field. “Ivan,” I said, taking pleasure in speaking his name. As he held me, I felt ebbing from me a terrible pain that I had been unaware of until that moment. “I’m so tired.”

“Want to wake up, or want to go to sleep?” he said.

“Sleep,” I said, but for whole minutes I couldn’t bring myself to move.

Upstairs, the morning light, gathering strength, made the melting frost on the bedroom window glow. I slept as if I hadn’t slept for a week, and then awoke, groping hurriedly through my life to place myself. Understanding, I looked out the window through the city night shine of frost: I was in Montreal with Ivan, and I had missed the day.

I stood in the doorway of the living room for a moment, looking. Ivan was there, sharing a bottle of wine with two women. One of them was striking and willowy, with a spill of light curls, and the other was small and dark and fragile-looking. When had Ivan become so much older?

The small woman was studying a photograph, and her shiny hair fell across her pretty little pointy face. “No, it is wonderful, Ivan,” she was saying. She spoke precisely, as if picking her way through the words, with the same accent I had heard at the airport. “It is a portrait of an entire class. A class that votes against its own interests. It is…a
photograph
of false consciousness.”

“Well, it’s a damn good print, anyway,” the other woman said. “Lovely work, Ivan.”

“We’re playing Thematic Apperception Test,” Ivan said, and the dark girl blushed and primly lowered her eyes. “We’ve had responses from Quebec and England. Let’s hear from our U.S. representative.” He handed me the photograph. “What do you see?”

Two women who, to judge from this view, were middle-aged, overweight, and poor stood gazing into a shop window at a display of tawdry lingerie. High up in the window was a reflection of mounded clouds and trees in full leaf. I did not feel like discussing the picture.

“Hello,” the small girl said, intercepting my gaze as I looked up. “I am Micheline, and this is my friend Fiona.”

Fiona reached lazily over to shake hands. “Hello,” I said, allowing our attention to flow away from the photograph. “Do you live here, Fiona, or in England?”

“Oh, let’s see,” she said. “Where do I live? Well, it’s been quite some time since I’ve even seen England. I’ve been in Montreal for a while, and before that I was in L.A.”

“Really,” I said. “What were you doing there?”

“What one does,” she said. “I was working in film.”

“The industry!” Micheline said. A hectic flush beat momentarily under her white skin, as if she’d been startled by her own exclamation. “There is much money to be made there, but at what personal expense!”

“Fiona has a gallery here,” Ivan said.

“No money, no personal expense.” Fiona smiled.

“It is excellent,” Micheline said. “Fiona exhibits the most important new photographs in Canada. Soon she will have a show of Ivan’s work.”

“Wonderful,” I said, but none of the others added anything. “We’re rather on display here, Ivan,” I said. “Are you planning to do something about curtains?”

Ivan smiled. “No.” Ivan’s rare smile always stopped me cold, and I smiled back as we looked at each other.

“It is not important,” Micheline said, reclaiming the conversation. “The whole world is a window.”

“Horseshit,” Fiona said good-naturedly, and yawned.

“Yes, but that is true, Fiona,” Micheline said. “Privacy is a—what is that?—
debased
form of dignity. It is dignity’s…atrophied corpse.”

“How good your English has become,” Fiona said, smiling, but Ivan had nodded approvingly.

“The rigorous Northern temperament,” Fiona said to me. “Sometimes I long for just a weekend in Los Angeles again.”

“Not me!” Micheline said. She kicked her feet impatiently.

“Have you lived there as well?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But I am sure. Beaches, hotels, drinks with little hats—”

“That’s Hawaii, I think,” I said.

“Perhaps,” Micheline said, looking sideways at me out of her doll’s face.

“So what about it?” Ivan said. “Have you two decided to stay for dinner?”

“No,” Micheline said, jumping to her feet. “Come, Fiona.” She held out her hand to Fiona, blushing deeply. “We must go.”

“All right.” Fiona yawned and stood. “But let’s have a rain check, Ivan. Micheline raves about your cooking. Maybe we’ll come back over the weekend for Micheline’s things. Sorry to have left them so long. We’ve been a while sorting things out.”

“No problem,” Ivan said. “Plenty of closet space.”

At the door, Micheline was piling on layers and layers of clothing and stamping like a little pony in anticipation of the snow.

“Tell me about them,” I said to Ivan after dinner, as we lay on the sofa, our feet touching. “Who are they?”

“What do you mean, ‘who’?” he said. “You met them.”

“Come on, Ivan,” I said. “All I meant was that I’d like to know more about your friends. How did you meet them? That sort of thing.”