The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (3 page)

Usually I enjoyed learning things from Cinder, but today everything she said made me feel worse. It wasn’t fair of her, I thought, to call Mr. Bunder a cowpat without knowing him. Of course, she would have called him a cowpat even if she did know him. Robert would have called him a cowpat, too. Well, except that Robert would think that cowpat was a stupid thing to call someone. And actually, come to think of it, Robert wouldn’t like Cinder one bit, either. And Cinder wouldn’t like Robert. Well, Mr. Bunder was always nice to me.

“And men like Mitchell just worry and worry, you know?” Cinder was saying. “They’re afraid they’ll either be contaminated or unmasked if they get too near a woman who isn’t beautiful. They’re afraid their own beauty is all they have, and that it isn’t really worth anything anyhow, and that it misrepresents their real inner disgustingness, and that they’re going to lose it—all that stuff. Thank God John Paul isn’t like that! He just loves being beautiful. He thinks he
deserves
to be beautiful, and it’s like he’s got this big present for anyone who happens to be around—drunks on the corner, women with baby carriages, the grocer.”

The little claim John Paul had staked on my arm asserted itself again, just as, with a huge thud, Mitchell climbed in the window. “Oh, don’t get up,” he said. “I was just passing by.”

“I’m really sorry, Mitchell,” Cinder said. “I’ll explain all of this later, but right now please, please get out there immediately and grab that kid before he does something really dumb.”

“When is John Paul supposed to get here?” I asked when Cinder had dispatched Mitchell.

“Pretty soon. Now, to be precise. But he’s always late,” she said. “Actually, he probably won’t come at all.”

“Oh, I’m sure he will,” I said. I would have liked to put an arm around Cinder, as she so easily did with me when I talked about Robert, but I could only sit there next to her with my hands in my lap.

“You know,” she said, “I think I’ve just figured out why men treat me so badly. It’s karma. I really think it is.”

I could figure out a few things about men myself, I thought. I could figure out, for instance, that men who said you looked a little like Meryl Streep meant that they didn’t find you attractive but they thought someone else might. And I could figure out that men who said you looked like Big Bird or a dinosaur skeleton didn’t think anyone would find you attractive.

“You’re lucky that you’re so nice,” Cinder said. “Men are going to treat you really well in your next life.”

“You know what?” I said after a moment. “I think Mitchell and Hector are in the kitchen.”

“Jesus,” Cinder said. “You’re right! What on earth is Mitchell doing, that maniac!”

“Does he know that John Paul’s supposed to come over?” I asked.

“Good point. I guess I didn’t get a chance to mention it.” She sucked air in through her teeth. “Well, Charles,” she said. “It’s up to you now.”

“No!” I said. “What do you mean? I can’t!”

“You’ve got to, Charlotte,” Cinder said.

I shut Cinder’s door carefully behind me and explained to the two men who were sitting comfortably at the table drinking beer that Cinder needed to be left utterly alone. “She says she feels like—like—there’s a machete in her head.”

“Probably a brain tumor,” Mitchell said, taking a sip of his beer.

“Should we call a doctor?” Hector said to me. He looked more solid at close range than he had out in the hall. He must have been twenty or twenty-one. “Or take her to the hospital?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, this happens all the time. The only thing to do is let her rest.”

“Well, I guess so. Listen—” Hector said. He wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Here’s my phone number. Could you ask her please to give me a call sometime when she’s feeling better?”

Downstairs, Mitchell nodded and walked off, leaving me to go in the opposite direction with Hector. I wanted to say good night to Hector, but we were in the middle of the block, so if I did say good night I would have to continue with him afterward, which would seem peculiar, or else I would have to turn and go back in the direction from which we’d just come, which would seem…well, also peculiar. So I decided I would say good night at the corner.

At the corner, Hector turned to me. “Want to get something to eat?”

Something to eat! I was just walking with him to get him out of the apartment! “I guess not,” I said. I turned to face him. “Thanks anyway…I really am hungry.”

“Well,” Hector said, “come on, then. There’s a good place a couple of blocks away.”

What was it that Puerto Ricans ate, I wondered as I walked along beside Hector, but the restaurant we entered was Italian, with pictures of harbors and flowers and entertainers overlapping on the walls, and cloths and glass-stoppered bottles of dark wine on the tables, around which sat large men and handsome, glistening women, all talking and laughing. It seemed, in fact, as if each table were a little boat, bobbing along on the hubbub of pleasure.

Hector and I were seated at our own table, and Hector got us outfitted with glasses for the wine, and a huge platter of vegetables—a whole fried harvest—and I felt that we ourselves had pulled anchor and were setting off like the others into that open expanse.

But then I was staring straight at a gold chain Hector wore. How had I come to be here with this person, I wondered. Yet the links lay flat along his neck, as sleek and secure as a stripe on some strange animal. “I’m sorry about Cinder,” I said.

Hector glanced away from me. “Everyone gets headaches at one time or another.”

What did he mean? “Actually,” I said, “I have a headache myself now. It must be because I got drunk this afternoon.”

“This afternoon?” Hector said.

“It was a mistake,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “So was that Cinder’s boyfriend?”

“Oh, heavens, no,” I said. “Mitchell’s just a friend. Actually, I never really thought about it before, but I suppose he is really quite attracted to Cinder. But you know what?” The words were forming themselves before I had a chance to think about them. “I don’t think he’s interested in women. I mean, in being involved with them.” Why had I said such a thing? Hector would want to talk about Cinder, not Mitchell.

“I had a cousin like that,” Hector said. “He liked girls pretty well, but he didn’t want any girlfriends. He didn’t like other boys, like a lot of boys do. But he wore drag all the time. Pretty dresses, silk underwear, you know? He was very nice. Everybody liked him, but he was about the strangest one in my family.”

The waiter moved our vegetables over to make room for vast dishes of spaghetti and sausage.

“What happened to him?” I asked. “Your cousin.”

“Oh, he’s O.K.,” Hector said. “He grew out of it. It was just a teenage thing for him. But he still doesn’t go out much with girls. Hey, this stuff is good, isn’t it? He teaches physical education in Pittsburgh now.”

We took a long time with our spaghetti, while Hector told me more about his family. It sounded as if they were fond of each other. And he told me about an information-theory class he was taking. “Are you studying?” he asked me.

“I’m finished now. I’m a lot older than you.” I looked straight at Hector. I wanted to make sure he understood that I wasn’t trying to make him think that I was his age, that the fact that he was a lot younger than I was was of no interest to me. It was Robert, after all, I wasn’t good enough for.

“Dessert and coffee?” the waiter asked before Hector could respond. “Or have you lost your appetite?”

“That’s right.” Hector gestured toward my plate as the waiter cleared it away. “You did pretty good, for a girl.”

When we were finished, Hector asked, “So do you like to go dancing?”

For an instant, Robert commandeered the air in front of me. He sat with his feet on his desk, leaning back and smiling. “Flattered?” he asked.

“Oh, no!” I said.

“Too bad,” Hector said. “I know a good place uptown.”

“No.” I got to my feet quickly. “I didn’t mean I didn’t want to go dancing—I meant I didn’t not want to go dancing.” I was breathing hard as I looked at him, as if I’d run to catch up with him.

“That’s what you meant, huh?” he said. “Far out.” But he grinned as he stood, and he stretched, letting one arm fall around me in a comradely manner.

Oh, it felt good to dance. I hadn’t gone dancing since Robert and I had started being unhappy. Hector knew a lot of people in the place we’d come to, and we stopped and talked with them. They spoke to Hector in Spanish, but when Hector put a defending hand on my shoulder and answered in English everyone else switched into English, too, except for a tiny dark star of a girl who continued in Spanish with Hector in a husky baby voice. “Her cousin in Queens has a ’62 Corvette that I want,” Hector told me. “And she says he’s thinking about selling it to me.”

He bought us Cokes and finished his own in one motion, while I watched his head tilt back and his throat work. “You don’t do drugs?” I said.

“I stay away from that stuff, mostly.” He looked very serious. “It seems like you can do a lot of things behind it, but that’s an illusion, see. I had a good friend, a heavy user, who died. Everyone thought he was a very happy guy. You see people, you talk to them—their faces say one thing, you never know what’s inside.” For a moment, he seemed almost incandescent, but then he smiled impatiently toward the room, laying aside his trustful seriousness. “Anyhow,” he said, “I like to keep in shape.” The gold around his neck winked, and I looked away quickly.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” I fought through the dancers and sat down near the wall. When I closed my eyes, I felt private for a moment, but when I opened them I was looking straight into the whole, huge crowd, right to where Hector was standing, listening attentively to the tiny dark girl. He looked dignified and brotherly as she smiled up at him, but then, suddenly, he flared into a laugh of pure appreciation.

In the ladies’ room, I held a wet paper towel against my forehead while a herd of girls jostled and giggled around me. Keep in shape, I thought. What had that meant! Had I been expected to admire him? Who was Hector, anyway? What on earth did he think I was doing there with him? Did he think I was attracted to him? And why had I chattered on with him so during dinner? He was just some kid my roommate had picked up on the street! I was wearing, the mirror reminded me, the same nasty office dress I’d been wearing when I sat next to Mr. Bunder light-years earlier in the day. Hector belonged with that girl who was flirting with him, or with Cinder, not with me, and I knew that just as much as he could ever know that, and if he had wanted to prove something to, or because of, Cinder, he had certainly picked the wrong person to prove it with.

When I got to the exit I glanced back and saw Hector in the throng, struggling toward me. And although because of the music I couldn’t hear him, I could see that he was calling my name. I stood in the cool air outside and closed the door slowly against the throbbing room, watching, like a scientist watching the demise of an experiment, as Hector’s expression changed from surprise to consternation to…what? Was he enraged? Affronted? Relieved?

On the subway, I thought how if Hector had been there with me, if we had been heading downtown together, tired out from dancing, we would have looked aligned. His restful, measuring regard as he leaned back against the wall of the car would have been matched by mine, and our arms would have been close enough so that I could feel the dissipating heat from his against my much paler, thinner one.

There was a group of girls balancing at one of the car’s center poles. They were slight and black-haired, like the girl Hector had been talking to, and like her they had long, brilliant nails. Their wrists were marvelously fragile, and their feet, in shiny leather, were like little hooves. I had never asked to compete with such girls, I thought, fuming.

I wanted to be alone when I got back to the apartment, but Mitchell was in the kitchen, pushing something around on a little hand mirror with a straw, and Cinder was lying on the floor in the peacock-blue dress.

“The dress with the bad seam!” I said.

“Madame wishes another snootful?” Mitchell asked, offering Cinder the mirror.

“Christ, no.” Cinder turned over and groaned. “What is that stuff, anyhow?”

“Drug du jour,” Mitchell said. “It was on sale.”

“Oh, Mitchell, Jesus,” she said. Mitchell had been right. She looked even better in that dress than the girl in the store had.

“Charlie,” she said, turning to me. I could see that she had been crying. “Listen. Let me ask you something. Do men always tell you that you’re really great in bed? That you’re the best?”

Only an instant escaped before I knew what to answer. “Always,” I said. “They always say that.”

“They are so sick,” she said. “What a bunch of sickos.”

“Guess you had a bad time with John Paul,” I said, even though I really didn’t want to hear about it.

“That about sums it up,” she said. “See that stuff on the floor? That used to be my gorgeous ceramic bowl. I really wish you’d been here, Charlie. I needed you.”

“I was needed by you elsewhere,” I said. “Remember Hector?”

“Hector?” she said. “What were you doing with Hector?”

“What was I doing with Hector?” I said. “How should I know what I was doing with Hector! I was doing you a favor, that’s what I was doing with Hector!”

“Charlie,” Cinder said. “What’s the matter? Are you mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you,” I said. “Just don’t call me that name, please. It’s a man’s name. My name is Charlotte.”

“Come on,” Cinder said. “Let’s have it. Tell Cinder why you’ve got a hair across your ass.”

“I do not have a hair across my ass,” I said. “whatever that means. I do not have a hair across my ass in any way. It’s just that I got Hector out of here so you could see John Paul and then you don’t even say, ‘Thank you, Charlotte. I really appreciate that.’”

“Thank you, Charlotte. I really appreciate that,” Cinder said. “Charlie—Sorry. Charlotte. Listen. You’re my best friend. What point would there be in my saying, ‘Oh, thank you, Charlotte,’ every time you did anything for me? You do thousands of things for me.”