The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (50 page)

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, as it dawned on me. “All right. I apologize, Sarah, all right? I’m a brute. I’m insensitive. I’m a white male.” Sarah folded her arms. “But frankly, my dear, it
is
a common expression. A manner of speaking. I rather imagine you’ve used it yourself upon occasion—”

Sarah interrupted. “But guess what, Dennis? I’m the person who’s never going to
be
starving. Because that’s the person I am, as it turns out. I’m the same person as Dot, Dennis, the same person as Gabriela—”

“Oh, come, now,” I said.

“‘
Oh, come now
,’” Sarah said. She kicked savagely at the mattress. “Because don’t you get it? I mean this is a
war
, Dennis. We’re soldiers,
and that’s our uniform.
” She started to cry with a thin, infuriating animal anguish. “See, I don’t understand why I didn’t
know
that. I don’t understand why I haven’t read about all this in the newspaper.”

“In the newspaper!” I said. “You don’t understand why you haven’t read about this in the
newspaper
? About what, please, Sarah—why you haven’t read about what?” Felt I was wading through a dark, cold river. An ashy river clogged with garbage and bones. “You don’t know why you haven’t read about who you
are
? In the newspaper? Do you consider that a front-page story? Sarah, listen to me. What are you trying to do to me? Are you trying to spoil all the
good
things? Yes, I suppose I should rush off to Zwicker and say, ‘Stop the presses, chief, there are some problems out there—rich people make more money than poor people. Life is unfair and people suffer.’ God knows, Sarah—it’s not as though I don’t agree with you, but think about it for a moment, please; use your head. You don’t read about yourself in the newspaper because that’s not what a newspaper is for. And you don’t read in the newspaper about the things that go on here, because
the things that go on here aren’t news.
”

God, it was awful. Mortifying. Sarah sobbing, me ranting—was
profoundly
mortified by my outburst. Got blue in the face apologizing, while Sarah sniffled and hiccuped and packed her beautiful textiles, sneaking beleaguered glances over her shoulder at me as though I had forced her at gunpoint to buy them. Made me feel literally like the Gestapo.

Thankfully, by the time we got to the airport she seemed to have exhausted herself—was just sleepy and absentminded, like a child after a tantrum.

On the plane Sarah stared at her closed book as a thin shield of cloud glided beneath us, but I peered across her out the window to watch the little country beneath us vanish.

Oh, the ravages of traveling. Poor Sarah. Unfamiliar rules, disturbance of one’s biological rhythms. Whole populations of new microbes…The plane went blood-dark for an instant; pale skin boiling up into sticky black welts, slow lines of black-windowed vans patrolling the pale mountains…

Hadn’t even occurred to me before—I’m
sick
! Bet we both are. Bet we’ve both picked up some sort of parasite. Damn, damn! Well, God knows I tried to be careful.

Oh, so much to do this week. Doctor. Work up a piece for Zwicker, of course. Unpack. Phone calls. Stacks of mail, naturally—naturally most of it catalogues. It’s funny, I always intend to throw them right out, but when it comes down to it I can never resist leafing through, to see all the idiotic junk—programmable toasters, telephones disguised as footballs—that someone has spent time dreaming up and someone will spend money to buy. Shook my head and forced a chuckle, but Sarah continued to look out the window. “Hey,” I said, tugging playfully at her sleeve. “I promised I’d take you to the Red Fox Inn tonight, remember?”

“The Red Fox Inn?” Sarah looked at me, then a veil dropped over her expression, and she turned back to the window.

All right. Yes, the planet is littered with bodies. No one’s going to dispute
that
—and the bodies are surrounded by clues. But what those clues mean, and where they point—well, that’s something else altogether, isn’t it?

Took Sarah’s unresisting hand, and for a moment feared I was going to burst into loud, raucous weeping. Strange airplane light showing the fatigue behind her closed eyes; showing the age, deep within her, boring its way to her surface.

But will it improve, the world, if Sarah and I stay in and subsist on a diet of microwaved potatoes? Because I really don’t think so. I really don’t think—and this is something I’ll say to Sarah when she’s herself again, I suppose—that by the standards of any sane person it could be considered a crime to go to a restaurant. To go someplace nice. After all. Our little comforts—The velvet murmur, the dimming of the street as the door closes, the enfolding calm of the other diners…that incredible moment when the waiter steps up, smiling, to put your plate before you…

Sounds stretch out in the station—footsteps, crackling announcements, rag ends of instructions and goodbyes echo and balloon, tangle in a mass that hangs high up under the sooty vaulting of transoms and girders. Far below, where a thin scurf of yellow electric light drifts among the newsstands and plaintive groups of benches, Dee Dee clutched her ticket and inspected rows of shiny candy bars and magazines. In the distance the station dissolves into a watery daylight where points of darkness appear, and swell, hissing, into trains.

Dee Dee reached, then hesitated, as though she were choosing cards from a gypsy’s pack. “Pardon,” a man said shortly, jostling her as he plucked a newspaper from in front of her. The train, she remembered; the important thing was getting on the train.

But where were Carl and Márta? Just a moment ago they had been walking toward the gate. She looked frantically at the flow of people—the line was already beginning to form: unhealthy-looking English families, ladies in twos, the occasional pampered businessman of the sort Dee Dee had seen in the restaurants, and, because it was summer, throngs of students, Americans especially, talking and lounging theatrically. Everyone wore the resolute, slightly exaggerated expressions of people beginning a journey, as though, fearing irremediable dislocation, they were determined to stamp themselves upon their own futures.

The line collected, and swayed with an absent fretfulness as Dee Dee searched it for Carl and Márta. Ah—there they were, standing a little off to one side. And something was wrong: Márta shook her short, dark hair; her hands flew up. Carl shied as if she were bombarding him, in her pretty accent, with little pellets.

Dee Dee started forward, then stopped. As though signaled by her panic, Carl and Márta turned. Dee Dee smiled uncertainly and waved with her bag of new magazines and candy. For a moment they simply looked at her.

She went light with dread—she was a scrap of something blowing away from them, tumbling away in Márta’s somber, lashy gaze. Carl’s hair gleamed like stiff filaments of silk. Then he raised his hand in a false little wave of reassurance, and Dee Dee was standing in place again.

Carl and Márta turned back to each other. “Carl,” Márta said, and Carl looked at her with terror, as though, Márta thought, she were some beast poised to destroy him.

How enraging. How
enraging
; was he trying to make her say something terrible to him? Well, she just might; if Dee Dee didn’t show up soon to stop her, heaven only knew what she might say.

Márta had been in a vicious mood since waking. She’d opened her eyes onto the freezing damp the English affected to consider summer, only to discover that her flatmate, Judit, had drunk the last of the coffee. “No more at all?” Márta demanded, ransacking the cupboard.

“Not unless you remembered to pick some up,” Judit said, unmoved. “It was on your list. Oh, by the way, István called this morning.”

Márta shut the cupboard doors with wonderful composure. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.

“You were asleep,” Judit said. “Remember?”

Márta sat. She ran her hands through her hair and listened to Judit’s spoon tinkle in her coffee cup. What a day for István to call. “What did he want?” she asked.

“István?” Judit shrugged. “I could hardly interrogate him, could I?”

The instant Judit disappeared into the bathroom to deplete the hot-water supply Márta dialed István. A courtesy; just to tell him she would be away for several weeks. With Carl. But István was out, of course. Or in—behind the sunny, mendacious message on his machine. Márta’s heart blackened; in with some girl, doubtless. Márta hung up without leaving a message.

She’d hurried to the station, but Carl and Dee Dee had not arrived yet. How grim it was, dirty and glum—and, with all the rushing strangers, treacherously neutralizing; she could hardly remember who she herself was. So István had decided he wanted to see her again. Too late; too bad, for him.

The air around her was stale with discarded hopes, angers, attitudes no longer useful to those who were traveling. She huddled on a bench to wait, beset by tales, half-heard in her childhood, of cold, of deportations, of police—events that filtered down like ineradicable pollutants from filthy times.

When she saw Carl and Dee Dee coming toward her she merely looked at them, her chin lifted. While Dee Dee hung back, goggling and dawdling like a child, Carl greeted Márta with a crisp little kiss on each cheek. She was not charmed. Did he not see how she felt? Did he not care?

She watched him as they waited in line for tickets. That limpid, meditative look of his! It was like a steel door, behind which he crouched, hiding.

He handed Dee Dee her ticket. “Is there anything you want before we get on the train?” he said. “It won’t be so easy to find things in English, remember.”

Dee Dee looked at him and put her hand over her mouth, then shambled off to a newsstand, leaving Márta to go to the train with Carl.

Something was bothering Carl. That, at least, was obvious. Márta looked at him, but his studied air of reverie enforced her silence. Still, the trip had been his idea; he had wanted her to come along. At least, he had pretended to. “Carl,” she said.

“Yes!” He turned to her with the transparently fraudulent expansiveness of someone forced to replace a tempting book on a shelf. “What is it?”

She stared at him, searching his face. He
didn’t
want to go.
Carl did not want to take this trip.
It was true; Márta was certain—she had the curse of being right. “Tell me, Carl, please,” she said, “why we are doing this.”

He flinched. “What do you mean?” he said, and then they both turned as though they’d been prodded from behind. Far down the station, Dee Dee stood in her bulky yellow slicker, a lost little lump, looking at them.

Márta had met Carl some weeks earlier at a party she’d attended with István and Judit. István was being suspiciously attentive and delightful; many attractive women were present. István loved parties. He rose to the occasion of being admired, and his paintings were beginning to sell.

Márta had been talking to István when a woman of fifty or so approached. She wore large pieces of ocher-smeared abalone on a thong around her neck and was known to collect paintings. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she said to Márta in a voice like an electric drill, and turned her back.

Her adornments, she was explaining to István, had once served as the currency of some now-impoverished coastal tribe. Márta began to drift away. István plucked at her sleeve, smiling merrily. She looked at him. He shrugged, and turned back to the woman.

In the hot, lively room, Carl was conspicuous for his satiny blond melancholy. Márta placed herself on the arm of a sofa not far from him and gazed out the window at the brooding houses across the street.

Carl drifted next to her and spoke easily, as though they shared some delicate and slightly sorrowful information. Was István watching? If so, certainly he would be jealous. Márta concentrated on sparkling empathetically up at Carl, but then understood that Carl was expecting her to respond to something. To what? she wondered. She made a modestly self-disparaging gesture. It served; Carl began to talk again.

He was truly handsome, she realized. Her sparkle lapsed as she stared. Carl lowered his eyes; his smile was clearly involuntary.

“Do you know many people here?” Márta asked stubbornly through her blush. Over Carl’s shoulder, she saw István talking to a girl. The girl was as fragile and responsive-looking as a fawn. She had lovely, trustful eyes, and István was talking to her with the earnest concern that Márta recognized as the hallmark of his most gluttonous moments. Poison squirted into her veins. “Excuse me,” she said to Carl. “I have a simply splitting migraine.”

Carl brought her to her flat. She was pale and silent. She had let István treat her too badly for too long; he expected her to put up with anything. And tonight, as she had peeked back into the party on her way out with Carl, István had glanced at her with cold dismissal.

Carl settled her on the sofa. He wrapped a blanket around her feet, found aspirin and a glass of water, and stood back uncomfortably. How cramped and shabby the flat looked! In Carl’s impeccable Occidental presence Márta saw it clearly. When she looked up at Carl he brushed away the tiny tears that hung ornamentally from her lashes. “You must rest,” he said.

Could she have bored him? “No, no,” she complained. “Sit and talk to me.” And he settled gingerly in a straight-backed chair. She hoped Judit would come in.

But by the time Judit returned, Márta was alone, still curled up on the sofa with the blanket around her feet, reading a novel to nurse a frail feeling of well-being.

Judit glowered. Judit and István had known each other from childhood in Budapest, and Judit took István’s side in everything. Márta had heard, from others of course, how for years Judit had tagged along after István, defended him, run errands for him; how she’d been ignored by him, except when he was sick or bored or wanted to meet one of her friends. “He isn’t going to call you again,” Judit said.

Márta looked up from her book, raising her eyebrows in pleasant inquiry. “István?” she said.

Judit snorted.

Poor Judit. All those girls, and never Judit. And it never would be Judit.

But despite Judit’s pronouncement, István did call. He called the very next day. Judit handed the phone silently over to Márta and left the room with a look of gratified persecution.

“Did you get home all right last night?” István said. His voice was silvery with sarcasm.

“Yes, thank you,” Márta said. “I was accompanied.”

“I am aware of that,” István said.

“I felt ill,” Márta said. “When I got home I had to lie down.”

In the silence she felt a little giddy—István was supposed to have been apologizing by now. “I didn’t like to interrupt you,” she said. “You were having such a good time.”

“I know what this is about,” he said. “This is about nothing. I don’t even know that girl. I only wanted her to meet you—that’s why I was talking to her.”

“What girl?” Márta said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” István said. “She’s only just arrived. You would be able to help her so much if you would only think of someone besides yourself for a change.”

“How can you even—” Márta began.

“If only you would dare to be a little kind to someone. A little friendly. Eva has no job yet, she has no friends here—”

Márta stared at the phone in incredulity. What about
her
? She had arrived alone and almost penniless only eight months before. The only reason she had survived was that she had taken the trouble to plan, painstakingly, from Budapest, so that she would not have to exploit other women’s escorts at parties. And for all her trouble, what did she have? What she had was, yes—a jealous flatmate, a shiftless roué of a lover, and a dull job in the store of a Hungarian goldsmith. Hardly enough to be tossed out in handfuls to passing girls. She hung up loudly and waited, but the phone was silent.

No matter, she thought, her eyes stinging.

But the days went by and István still didn’t call. So then, when Carl did, relief transformed her terror into a tremulous elation.

Carl took Márta to dinner in a pretty French restaurant. The china was thin, milkily luminous in the candlelight, gold-rimmed. On their table were a few flowers so exquisite they seemed about to perish with a little cry. And all around them from the other tables was a soothing rustle, like that of foliage, or money.

Outside, too, was the London Márta had come to but had never before entered. The great green floating parks, the pantherlike cars, the lofty ivory-colored crescents and terraces, the darkly shining shop windows, behind which salesgirls who looked like whippets showed one jewel-like dress, then another, to customers with excellent shoes and handbags.

Márta had begun to think that London might close her inescapably into the brittle émigré life she dreaded, some contemporary version of the lives of relatives she’d heard about in Paris and New York, great-aunts and distant elderly cousins whose apartments were like satellites crammed with dried old bits of uprooted finery. They drank streams of tarry coffee in tiny cups, they ate those few local pastries to which they could resign themselves, as they waited to be orbited back to prewar Budapest.

But, no—Deliverance was everywhere. Márta closed her eyes in thanks, then directed at Carl a smile of gratitude so forceful it almost knocked over a passing waiter.

The smile Carl returned was somewhat puzzled. Indeed, he seemed not to be saying anything much of interest. His firm, he was telling Márta, manufactured machine tools. It was based in Stuttgart but exported goods all over Europe, the United States, and Canada. He would prefer to be on the theoretical rather than the applied end of things, but—he shrugged—this was not bad for now. He enjoyed the irregular schedule, the travel, the flexibility…He picked up the saltcellar and examined it, frowning.

“And how is it that you’re working for a German company?” Márta asked.

“Why not?” He glanced at her. “After all, I am German…Of course it’s rather…That is, technically I did grow up there”—he hesitated—“as I think I was saying to you the other evening…”

The other evening! At the party? At her flat? She’d had so much on her mind! “My father and stepmother…” Carl coughed. “But I spent all that time here, of course—school, university. Those holidays at Andrew’s…Actually, people do tend to take me for English.”

“How wonderful it must be,” Márta said, throwing a hasty cover over her confusion, “to be as much at home one place as the other.”

Carl laughed sadly. “‘As much at home.’ Indeed…”

“But to travel, as well,” she added encouragingly. Perhaps he didn’t appreciate his own good fortune; she herself would love to travel, to be able to travel, to be able just to delve into this new, this real, London. Not to have to worry, always, about money.

“Yes,” Carl was saying. “It’s good, isn’t it, traveling. Sometimes you get a feeling that things could change. Or open up. You thought it was an endless dark tunnel, but then…” He picked up the saltcellar again.