The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (59 page)

A little bug was clambering insecurely over the strap of her camisole, making its way to the cupid’s bow peak of her collarbone. She located it and let it board her finger, with which she conveyed it to the window. Her hands were fine and pliant, Rob noticed, her nails bitten savagely. A protracted shudder rose the length of his spine. “Sick, how?” he asked.

“Sick, plain old,” Suky said. “I guess they put water in that juice this morning, huh.” That was all she seemed to have to say. She stood aimlessly in the doorway.

Rob leaned over to sling his pack up on the bed. “I brought some clean water,” he said.

“Clever,” Suky said, unenthusiastically.

So, what more could he possibly do? “Did you have a good day?” he said.

“Yeah,” Suky said. “Really great. And who knows—maybe Mick will stop throwing up eventually and we’ll be able to go back tomorrow. I really look forward to the drive, don’t you? Through guerrilla country with an informer in the car?”

“Army informer?” Rob stared at Suky. “Kimball?”

“Consultant, if you prefer,” she said. “What did you think, he’s an anthropologist?” She hugged herself despite the heat. “You and Mick, Jesus.” Her hair curled like steam around her neck and temples, her camisole was spotted with damp. From the window past her, Rob saw the tourists assembling at the boat below.
Time to get up, time to get up
—He remembered his parents’ cheerful morning voices; the way he had floated, waking from his night voyages, back into his own bed.

“But what we have to do now,” Suky said, “is get some candles. The sun’s going to set any minute.”

“Candles,” Rob said. “Candles…Oh, listen—better give these to Mick.” He held out his two remaining bottles of water. “Before he gets dehydrated.”

Suky watched him. “What about you?”

One of the dark blotches on her camisole seemed to be spreading slightly. Or possibly not. “The thing is,” he said, “I’ve got to get down to the boat.”

She took one of the bottles of water from him. “Great,” she said. Her skin gave off its faint sparkle, her face was expressionless, “So. Well. Bon voyage.”

“Wait—” Rob said. “Is there—is there some way I could help?” But she was gone, and the stiffness and insincerity of his voice stopped him from calling after her.

Down at the dock the children clung to him, their eyes huge, their tiny hands searching for his pockets. A skinny monkey of a boatman with bare feet and torn, rolled-up pants was collecting the last fares. Rob squinted back at the village: green, fog, glints of tin. But he! Yes, they were all exposed down here at the dock, pinned behind the hidden crosshairs.

Across the lake a cluster of boxy buildings, all no bigger than his fingernail, floated in a disk of harsh blue. Hard to believe town was so close, that he and Suky and Mick had been there only this morning. Hard to believe that he was simply going back there now, to the loud, junky restaurants; to the strained, moribund, fever-pitch cheer of ladinos and gringos vacationing…
Time to get up, time to get up…

He found Suky at the pavilion, sitting over another meal of rice and beans. “I brought a flashlight,” he said. He took it from his pack, and held it out as an offering. “I thought you might need it.”

She glanced up at him, then held out a sheaf of candles in answer.

A little girl, no more than six, arrived with a Coke for Suky.
“Dónde está Pablo?”
Rob asked. The girl stared at him.

“Reinforcements for the night crowd,” Suky explained. “Pablo’s in the kitchen, cooking.”

Rob looked around; the restaurant was empty except for himself and Suky. “Mind if I sit with you?” Rob said, and waited until Suky shrugged.

Dusk was collecting rapidly, settling in heavy folds around the hills and shacks. All along the road, up and down the paths through the village, points of candles began to move at the stately pace of Indians. The volcano and the low vegetation appeared as a furze against the darkness; the sky and lake blended in a colorless sheen.

The little girl brought rice and beans for Rob. He ate a few bites—it was possible to eat, now that he was no longer hungry. Suky lit one of her candles and stuck it onto the table. The little girl drew close and gazed into the flame; she ran her finger sensuously along one of the other candles and looked at Suky, who shook her head no. The little girl leaned against Suky with a loud sigh, which turned into a yawn.
“Tienes hambre?”
Suky said.

“Hambre,”
the child agreed, and Suky picked her up. Settled in Suky’s lap, the child finished Suky’s meal, then Rob’s, eating delicately with tortillas. When Suky stroked her glorious, filthy black hair, she responded with a snuffly little intake of breath, and they snuggled against each other, sated and filmy-eyed.

Pablo called from the kitchen; the little girl wriggled off Suky’s lap. She picked up one of the candles and looked challengingly at Suky. “All right.” Suky sighed.
“Sí.”

“Y para Pablo?”
the little girl said.

Suky rubbed her forehead. Was she crying? No, just fatigued, apparently. “Okay,” she said, and the child scampered off to the kitchen with her trophies.

The sky at the other side of the lake was still faintly blue; it had been clear the whole of the four, vanished days Rob had spent there; clear, he thought with tunneled reverberations of grief.

“I didn’t take the boat,” he said.

“Is that so,” Suky said. She rubbed her forehead again.

“I didn’t think I should leave you alone when Mick wasn’t well,” Rob said.

“Rob,” she said, and he floundered in her amber stare. “Rob, let me clarify something, please: Fuck you.”

Rob sighed. He passed his finger idly through the candle flame. It had fascinated him as a child—that you could do it and not feel heat; that any household object might disclose inexplicable gaps within a supposed sequence of events.
Was everything he said some sort of lie?

A dog barked, began to bay. “Shit,” Suky said. Candles blinked out one after the other, and night gushed over the village as two dogs, three dogs, joined in until a claxon sprang up in a ring around Rob and Suky. “Let me guess,” Rob said.
“Brujos.”

Suky pinched out their candle, making the sky huge with moonlight, and Rob saw what she and the dogs had seen already: a line of black dots, small black shapes moving down the hills closer and closer, winding off a silent cog—a dark chain of soldiers, holding their rifles, descending into the village.

“It’s okay—” Suky’s quiet voice hovered within the wheeling frenzy of the dogs. “It happens every night. Someone we bought from let it slip to me and Mick today. Remember the guys we saw out front this morning? Every night they all come down. The whole unit. And they stay in the village all night and into the day. But while the tourists are here they have to evaporate, right? So when the mail boat arrives they go back up to their barracks to sleep and the tourists stumble happily around.”

On the road below, a few late stragglers hurried past with candles, their faces stark with purpose in the circle of illumination.

“The boat,” Rob said. “The mail boat…”

“Uh-huh,” Suky said. “And now the tourists are gone.”

The hotel keeper was still at the door. What was he always watching for, Rob wondered. Could he and Kimball discern one another through the blackness, across the hills, as clearly as if they were facing each other, inches apart?
I saw the village, I saw the market, I saw the church,
Rob insisted to himself, but all he could see now was a limitless dark, screened by the reflection of his own face, its expression of untested integrity, of convenient innocence.

Inside the courtyard the three blonds were feasting, fierce and ceremonial, on their pineapple. One of them hacked off a chunk of it with a long, shining knife, and held it out toward Suky. She paused. A troubling warmth floated off her. She shook her head, as though something had been denied, rather than offered to her. “Suky—” Rob said. She glanced at him, then turned away.

Tatters of shine lay on the center of the lake; the boat would have passed through them long before, and in the electric glare that was town, the tourists would just be tucking into steaks, ordering fancy mixed drinks, turning on the televisions in their hotel rooms…But from town, this hotel, the whole village, in fact, would be invisible. Even from Rob’s window, the shacks scattered just outside showed only as indeterminate patches of depthless black. Were soldiers, their rifles cocked, squatting there against barricaded doors?
Hi, my name is Bob
, Rob saw. He blew out his candle, but night covered the story that was unfolding below for no other witnesses.

He stretched out on his bed. The darkness around him rustled and whispered, and a satiny gleam from the moon and stars began to collect on his body. In country like this there were probably animals, all kinds of animals, jungly things. Not lions or elephants, of course, but snakes, certainly, and even monkeys, perhaps—the kind that screamed at night—and small nocturnal creatures that looked like big cats or rats and frolicked through ruins of huts where people had recently lived. Just born, they would sleep for a few days in shaded hollows, and then one night unlid their jewel-like eyes.

And when they opened their tiny new mouths, when their new little natures ordained that this one or that one stretch the hinges of its sleek new jaws, what pleasures of discovery there would be! The flickering tongue, the high-pitched howl, the needle-pointed teeth, whatever marvelous instrument it was, discovered anew by each new being, that was the special gift of its species. Yes. Rob’s heart pounded as though he’d run to keep an appointment.

When the knock came, he waited for one luxurious moment; the gleam slid off him as he stood.

“Mick wants water,” Suky said from the doorway.

Rob cleared his throat. “How is Mick?” he asked. “Puking,” she said. “As usual.”

“Sit down,” he said, breathless. “I’ve got that other bottle around here somewhere.” Again, a long shudder ascended his spine.

Suky rested, propped up on one elbow, while Rob pretended to search. When he could stand it no longer, he retrieved the bottle and a stack of styrofoam cups from their corner. “Here,” he said.

Suky reached for the bottle, but he held it back. “Careful, careful,” he said, experimentally. “It’s all I’ve got left.”

She looked at him sharply, before her face became opaque.

When she held out her hand again slowly, he relinquished the bottle.

Trembling, he disengaged two cups from the stack. Suky poured some water into each; the sound was deafening. “Cheers,” he thought he heard her say, and their cups scraped together.

He struggled to restrain his uncoiling mind as he traced Suky’s collarbone with his finger and blinked back the veil of terror that kept gathering across his eyes. Darkness was reaching out like creepers, unfolding into thick, oily petals, and distant sounds were becoming audible; Rob’s thoughts were pattering here and there in darkness. “What’s going on?” he whispered against Suky’s throat, but her eyes narrowed, gleamed, dilated—already she was gliding off. Those distant cries—something waking now to the fragrance of blood? Levering the straps down from Suky’s shoulders, Rob strained to hear, and waited.

“Are you going to be all right, Aaron?” Caroline said.

Shapiro saw himself, as if in a dream, standing on a dark shore. “Yes,” he heard himself say.

“Are you sure?” Caroline said.

Lady Chatterley leaned herself thuggishly against Shapiro’s shin and began to purr. “Hello, there,” he said. He reached down and patted her gingerly.

Caroline hesitated at the door, then took a few steps back toward Shapiro, and her delicious, clean fragrance spilled over him. “Your big concert’s in less than a month now…” She tilted her head and managed a little smile.

Was she going to touch him? Shapiro went rigid with alarm, but she just looked vaguely around the room. “You know, it’s supposed to be a beautiful country…” She scooped up Lady Chatterley and nuzzled the orange fur. “Chat. Dear little Chat. Are you going to take care of Aaron?” She took a paw in her hand. “Are you?”

Lady Chatterley wrenched herself free and bounded back to the floor. Caroline’s eyes—like Lady Chatterley’s—were large and light and spoked with black. Her small face was pale, always, as though with shock.

“Shall I help you with your things?” Shapiro said.

There was really only one suitcase, a good one—leather, old, genteel—which had probably accompanied Caroline to college; the rest had gone on before. “No need,” she said. Tears wavered momentarily in her eyes. “Jim’s picking me up.”

The suitcase appeared to be heavy. Shapiro watched Caroline’s thin legs as she struggled slightly with it. At the door she turned back. “Aaron?” she said.

He waited to hear himself answer, but this time no words came.

“Aaron, I know this is probably not what you want to hear right now, but I think it’s important for me to say it—I’ll always care about you, you know. I hope you know that.”

Shapiro awoke suddenly and unpleasantly, as though a crateful of fruits had been emptied out on him. There was an unfamiliar wall next to him, and the window was all wrong. He heard footsteps, a snicker. A hotel room wobbled into place around him—yes, Richard Penwad would be coming to pick him up, and Caroline wasn’t even in this country.

The night had been crowded with Caroline and endless versions of her departure—dreamed, reversed in dreams, modified, amended, transfigured, made tender and transcendently beautiful as though it had been an act of sacral purification. For a week or so he had been free of her, or at least anesthetized. But this morning he was battered by her absence; in this distant place his body and mind didn’t know how to protect themselves.

As soon as she’d left that day, he’d closed his eyes. An afterimage of the door glowed. When he’d opened his eyes again, the room seemed strange in an undetectable way, as though he were seeing it after a hiatus of years. Hesitantly, he brushed cat fur from the armchair and sat down.

Six years. Six years of life that belonged to them both, out the door in the form of Caroline’s fragile person. If only there’d been less…tension about money. Caroline, from many generations of a background she referred to as “comfortable,” was deeply sympathetic with, and at the same time deeply insensitive to, the distress of others. “Why not, Aaron?” she would say. “Why don’t I just take care of the rent from now on?” Or, when she felt like going to some morbidly expensive restaurant, “I could treat. Wouldn’t it be fun, for a change? Of course”—she would gaze at him with concern—“if you’re not going to enjoy it…” Sometimes, when she noticed him grimly going through the mail or eying the telephone, she would say gently, “Something will turn up.”

Though not quite a prodigy, Shapiro had been received with great enthusiasm at the youthful start of his career. He’d been shy and luminously pale, with dark curls and almost freakish technical abilities that delighted audiences. But the qualities he greatly admired and envied in other pianists—varieties of a profound musicianship which focussed the attention on the ear, hearing, rather than on the hand, executing—were ones he lacked. He practiced, he struggled, he cultivated patience, and he was rewarded—minimally. By just the faintest flicker of heat in his crystalline touch.

His curls, pallor, and technique lost some of their brilliance; his audience was distracted by newcomers and dispersed, and a sudden increase in the velocity of the earth’s spin dumped Shapiro into his thirty-eighth year.
Aaron Shapiro.
Caroline had been starry-eyed when they’d met, although by that time he’d already moved out to the margin of the city and was beginning to take on private students, startlingly untalented children who at best thought of the piano as a defective substitute for something electronic. Gradually he ceased to be the sort of pianist who might expect to make recordings, give important concerts, be interviewed, hold posts at conservatories. His name, once received like a slab of precious metal, was now received like a slip of blank paper.

“Things will work out,” Caroline said, although “things,” in Shapiro’s estimation, were deteriorating. She touched him less often. Her smiles became increasingly lambent and forbearing. Sometimes she called in the afternoon to say she’d be held up at work. Her voice would be hesitant, apprehensive; her words floated in the air like dying petals while he listened, reluctant to hang up but unable to think of anything to say.

Recently, he’d been silent for whole evenings, reading, or simply sitting. Rent, plus utilities, plus insurance, minus lessons, plus food—columns of figures went marching through his head, knocking everything else out of it. Once, after he’d had a day of particularly demoralizing students, Caroline perched on the arm of his chair. “Things will work out,” she said, and touched his cheek.

She might just as well have socked him. “Things will work out?” he said. He was ready to weep with desire that this be true, yet it was manifestly not. “You mean—Ah. Perhaps what you mean is that things will work out for some other species. Or on some other planet. In which case, Caroline, you and I are in complete accord. After all, life moves on.”

She was staring at him, her hand drawn back as though she’d inadvertently touched a hot stove. Was that his voice? Were those his words? He could hardly believe it himself. Those stiff words, like stiff little soldiers, stiff with shame at the atrocities they were committing.

“Life moves on,” he continued, ruthless and miserable, “but not necessarily to the benefit of the individual, does it? Yes, things will work out eventually, I suppose. But do you think they’ll work out for the guy who sleeps in front of our building? Do you think—” The danger and excitement of probing his terror narrowed his vision into a throbbing circle, from which Caroline, imprisoned, stared back. “Do you think they’ll work out for me?”

She’d retreated to the other room, and he sat with his head in his hands. Evidently, Caroline herself did not understand or accept the very thing she had just forced him to understand and accept—that he, like most humans, was an experiment that had never been expected to succeed, a little padding around some evolutionary thrust, a scattershot nubbin of DNA. It was a matter of huge biological importance, for some reason, that he be desperate to meet the demands of his life, but it was a matter of no biological importance whatever that he be
able
to meet them.

But that week—that very week—an airmail letter arrived from a Richard Penwad inviting Shapiro to play Umberto García-Gutiérrez’s Second Piano Concerto at a Pan-American music festival.

An amazing occurrence. Though one that, having occurred, was—like every other occurrence—plausible. The terrible feeling hanging over the apartment began to evaporate. Shapiro was embarrassed by his recent behavior and feelings, which now seemed absurdly theatrical, absurdly childish. Of course things would work out. Why wouldn’t things work out? Why shouldn’t he and Caroline go to whatever restaurant she pleased? And enjoy it. Order some decent wine, attend concerts, travel…Check in hand, he would lead Caroline into the bower of celebrity and international conviviality from which he’d been exiled. However gradually, in due course things would work out.

In the days that followed, Shapiro felt by turns precariously elated and violently dejected, as though he were emerging from the chaos of an accident that had left him impaired in as yet undisclosed ways. He would catch Caroline gazing at him soberly with her great, light-filled eyes. She mentioned the invitation frequently. “Isn’t it terrific?” she said. “Aaron. How terrific.” Her voice was tender and lingering—remote, the voice in which, when they’d first met, she’d recounted to Shapiro tales of her idyllic childhood. Then, one evening, when he came home with a guidebook, she said, “Listen, Aaron.” And her voice had been especially gentle. “We have to talk.”

Shapiro checked the clock by his uncomfortable bed; it would be a relief to go downstairs and meet Penwad. His brain felt unbalanced by Caroline’s precipitous entrances and exits; anything to block them. He shut the door of his dark, cramped room behind him, and descended to the restaurant; yes, unbalanced! The corridors themselves seemed to buckle underfoot.

The festival would have been an attractive proposition even at the best of times. Shapiro had played once before in Latin America—a concert in Mexico City many years earlier. The air in the hall had been velvety with receptivity, the audience ideal, and although his piece had been first on the program, they had demanded an encore from him right then and there.

The García-Gutiérrez concerto had furnished other happy occasions in his career. He’d performed its United States première some seventeen years earlier. The piano part was splashy and difficult, perhaps not terribly substantial, but an excellent vehicle for Shapiro; it glittered in his hands. García-Gutiérrez had been there to congratulate him with a quiet intensity. What would he look like now, Shapiro wondered. At that time he’d been handsome—silvery hair, tall, hooded eyes. How young Shapiro must have seemed, with his abashed, eager gratitude!

Penwad was already downstairs at the restaurant drinking a coffee. He extended, with official enthusiasm, a carefully manicured but stubby hand, and grimaced as Shapiro shook it. “We’re pleased we could get you down,” he said, and glanced at his palm. “This is our first go at the festival, I think I must have written you, but we’re hoping to bring people such as yourself annually, from all over the Americas—especially the States. We’re starting out with García-Gutiérrez as our star attraction, you see, because he’s a local boy.”

On the walls were posters of palm-fringed lakes, frosted volcanoes, and Indians smiling regal, slightly haughty smiles. Interspersed with the posters were magnificent examples of Indian textiles.

“Charming, isn’t it?” Penwad said. “Not a—an
ostentatious
place, but we felt you’d find it charming.”

Charming, Shapiro thought. Well, probably the other hotels were even worse. He glanced at the walls again. Charming! It was well known, what was happening in this country to the descendants of its earliest inhabitants—massacres, internment, debt slavery, torture—and,
naturally
, the waiters who scurried around beneath the smiling posters, looking raddled and grief-stricken, were Indians, ceremonial costumes draping their skinny bodies.

“People don’t tend to be aware how vigorous our sponsorship of the arts is,” Penwad was saying. “We’re hoping the festival will help to…rectify the, ah, perception that we’re identified with the military here.”

Shapiro’s attention was wrenched from the waiters. “The perception that…”

“Rectify that perception,” Penwad said.

Fee, Shapiro reminded himself. Fee plus lessons, minus rent, minus utilities…Well, and besides, there would be the credit. In a program note, even the most dubious event acquired grandeur. And why not? Concerts and exhibitions from the beginning of time had been funded by villains in search of endorsement, apologists, a place in history, or simple self-esteem. “Incidentally,” Shapiro said, “who is ‘we’?”

Penwad raised his eyebrows. “Who is we?” he said.

“That is, when you say ‘we’—”

“Ah,” Penwad said. “Well, I’m not including myself, actually. I’m just a liaison, really, between the Embassy and various local committees and groups concerned with the arts.”

“I see,” Shapiro said, with no attempt at tact.

“So,” Penwad said. “We’ll get you a bit of breakfast, then go on over to the Arts Center, take a little look around—Rehearsal all day, rather strenuous, I’m afraid. After that we’ve fixed up a little interview for you—I trust that’s all right—around dinnertime. Friday’s free until the concert. Joan and I will pick you up first thing in the morning to show you around.” He smiled. “Joan has her own ideas, but you must say what interests
you.
Then, after the concert, there’s to be a party, a reception for you, essentially, at the home of some friends of ours, very fine people here. Then plane, yes? Very next morning.” He already, Shapiro noticed, looked relieved. “Quite a whirlwind.”

“Wonderful,” Shapiro said. “But no need, you know, to take me over to the…Arts Center. Why don’t I just grab a taxi?”

Penwad waved his hand. “I’m afraid the Center is difficult to find. Most of the drivers are unfamiliar with it. Besides,” he added, “enjoy your company.” He narrowed his eyes at his coffee cup, and raised it to his mouth.