The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (17 page)

“Actually,” he said, “I hardly know Fiona. Micheline just brought her over once before.”

“Micheline’s so extreme,” I said, smiling.

“She’s very young,” Ivan said.

“I used to be young,” I said. “But I was never that extreme, was I?”

“She’s a purist,” Ivan said. “She’s a very serious person.”

“She seemed a bit of a silly person to me,” I said. “Have she and Fiona been together long?”

“Just a month or so,” he said.

“Micheline doesn’t seem as if she’s really used to being with another woman, somehow,” I said. Ivan glanced at a page of newspaper lying on the floor below him. Some headline had caught his eye apparently. “She was sort of defiant,” I said. “Or nervous. As if she were making a statement about being gay.”

“On the contrary,” Ivan said. “She considers that to be an absolutely fraudulent opposition of categories—gay, straight. Utterly fraudulent.”

“Do you?” I said.

“What is this?” Ivan said. “Are you preparing your case against me? Yes,
The People of the United States of America versus Ivan Augustine Olmstead.
I know.”

“How long did she live here?” I said.

“Three months,” he said, and then neither of us said anything or moved for about fifteen minutes.

“Ivan,” I said. “I didn’t call you. You wanted me to come up here.”

He looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we’re both very tense.”

“Of course I’m tense,” I said. “I don’t hear from you for six months, then out of the blue you summon me for some kind of audience, and I don’t know what you’re going to say. I don’t know whether you want some kind of future with me, or whether we’re having our last encounter, or what.”

“Look,” he said. He sat upright on the sofa. “I don’t know how to say this to you. Because, for some reason, it seems very foreign to you, to your way of thinking. But it’s not out of the blue for me at all, you see. Because you’re always with me. But you seem to want to feel rejected.”

“I don’t want to feel rejected,” I said. “But if I’ve been rejected I’d just as soon know it.”

“You haven’t been rejected,” he said. “You can’t be rejected. You’re a part of me. But instead of enjoying what happens between us, you always worry about what
has
happened between us, or what
will
happen between us.”

“Yes,” I said. “Because there is no such thing as an independent present. How can I not worry each time I see you that it will be the last?”

“You act as if I had all the power between us,” he said. “You have just as much power as I do. But I can’t give it to you. You have to claim it.”

“If that were true,” I said, “we’d be living together at least half the time.”

“And if we were living together,” he said, “would you feel that you had to go to work with me or stay with me in the darkroom to see whether my feelings about you changed minute by minute? It’s not the quantity of time we spend together that makes us more close or less close. People are to each other what they are.”

“But that can change,” I said. “People’s interests are at odds sometimes.”

“Not really,” he said. “Not fundamentally. And you would understand that if you weren’t so interested in defending your isolating, competitive view of things.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Ivan? Are you really saying that there’s no conflict between people?”

“What I’m saying is that it’s absurd for people to be obsessed with their own little roles. People’s situations are just a fraction of their existence—the difference between those situations is superficial, it’s arbitrary. In actuality, we’re all part of one giant human organism, and one part can’t survive at the expense of another part. Would you take off your sock and put it on your hand because you were cold? Look—does the universe care whether it’s you or Louis Pasteur that’s Louis Pasteur? No. From that point of view, we’re all the same.”

“Well, Ivan,” I said, “if we’re all the same, why drag me up here? Why not just keep Micheline around? Or call in a neighbor?”

He looked at me, and he sighed. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I just don’t care about you in the way that you need. I just don’t know. I don’t want to falsify my feelings.”

But when I saw how exhausted he looked, and miserable, loneliness froze my anger, and I was ashamed that I’d allowed myself to become childish. “Never mind,” I said. I wished that he would touch me. “Never mind. We’ll figure it out.”

It was not until the second week that I regained my balance and Ivan let down his guard, and we were able to talk without hidden purposes and we remembered how it felt to be happy together. Still, it seemed to me as if I were remembering every moment of happiness even as it occurred, and, remembering, mourning its death.

One day, Ivan was already dressed and sitting in the kitchen by the time I woke up. “Linda called this morning,” he said. “She let the phone ring about a hundred times before I got it. I’m amazed you slept through it.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down.

“I wonder why people do that,” he said. “It’s annoying, and it’s pointless.”

“It wasn’t pointless in this case,” I said. “You woke up.”

“Want some toast?” Ivan asked. “Eggs?”

“No, thanks,” I said. I hardly ever ate breakfast. “So, is she all right?”

“Fine,” he said. “I guess.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said.

“Remember that apartment I had in Washington?” he said. “I loved that place. It was the only place I ever lived where I could get the paper delivered.”

“How’s Gary?” I said.

“Well, I don’t know,” Ivan said. “According to Linda, he’s got some kind of flu or something. She’s gotten it into her head that it’s psychosomatic, because this is the first time since he was born that I haven’t come home for Christmas.”

“Home,” I said.

“Well,” Ivan said. “Gary’s home.”

“Maybe you should go,” I said.

“He’ll have to adjust sometime,” Ivan said. “This is just Linda’s way of manipulating the situation.”

I shrugged. “It’s up to you.” I wondered, really for the first time, what Ivan’s son looked like. “Do you have a picture of Gary?”

“Somewhere, I think,” Ivan said.

“I’d like to see one,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “You mean now?”

“Well, I’d like to,” I said.

Steam rose from my coffee and faded into the bright room. Outside the window, light snow began to fall. In a few minutes Ivan came back with a wallet-sized snapshot.

“How did you get into this picture?” I said.

He took it from me and peered at it. “Oh. Some friends of Linda’s were over that day. They took it.”

“So that’s Linda,” I said. For nine years I’d been imagining the wrong woman—someone tired and aggrieved—but the woman in the photograph was finely chiseled, like Ivan. Even in her jeans she appeared aristocratic, and her expression was somewhat set, as if she had just disposed of some slight inconvenience. She and Ivan could have been brother and sister. The little boy between them, however, looked clumsy and bereft. His head was large and round and wobbly-looking, and the camera had caught him turning, his mouth open in alarm, as if he had fallen through space into the photograph. A current of fury flowed through me, leaving me as depleted as the child in the picture looked. “What if he
is
sick?” I said.

“Kids get sick all the time,” Ivan said.

“You could fly down Christmas Eve and come back the twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh.”

“Flying on Christmas Eve’s impossible anyhow,” he said.

“Well, you could go down tomorrow.”

“What about you?” he said.

“What about me?” I said.

“If I can even still get reservations,” he said.

“Call and see,” I said. “I’ll call.” Linda had probably never, in awe of Ivan’s honey-colored elegance that was so like her own, hesitated to touch him as I sometimes did. As I did right now.

The next day, Ivan bought some toys, much more cheerful and robust than the child they were for, and then I watched him pack. And then we went out to the airport together.

I took the little airport bus back alone, and I felt I had been equipped by a mysterious agency: I knew without asking how to transport myself into a foreign city, my pockets were filled with its money, and in my hand I had a set of keys to an apartment there. The snow still fell lightly, detaching itself piece by piece from the white sky, absorbing all the sound. And the figures past which we rode looked almost immobile in their heavy clothing, and not quite formed, as if they were bodies waiting to be inhabited by displaced souls. In the dark quiet of the bus, I let myself drift. Cities, the cities where I visited Ivan, were repositories of these bodies waiting to be animated, I thought sleepily, but how did a soul manage to incarnate itself in one?

All night long I slept easily, borne away on the movements of my new, unfettered life, but I awoke to a jarring silence. Ivan had taken the clock.

I looked around. It was probably quite late. The sun was already high, and the frost patterns, which seemed always on the verge of meaning, were being sucked back to the edges of the window as I stared. In the kitchen I sat and watched the light pooling in rich winter tints across the linoleum, and eventually the pink-and-pewter evening came, and frost patterns encroached on the windows again. How quickly the day had disappeared. The day had sat at the kitchen window, but the earth had simply rolled away from under it.

It was light again when I woke. I thought suddenly of the little plant on my windowsill in New York. It would be dead by now. I felt nauseated, but then I remembered I hadn’t eaten the day before.

There was nothing in the refrigerator, but in the freezer compartment I found a roll of chocolate-chip-cookie dough. How unlike Ivan to have such a thing—what circumstances had prompted him to buy it? Ah—I saw Micheline and Ivan with a shopping cart, laughing: the purists’ night off.

I searched through the pots and pans—what a lot of clatter—but there was a cookie sheet. Good. I turned on the oven and sawed through the frozen dough. Soon the kitchen was filling with warmth. But an assaultive odor underlay it, and when I opened the oven door, I found the remains of a leg of lamb from earlier in the week that we’d forgotten to put away. The bone stood out, almost translucent, and the porous sheared face of meat was still red in the center. “Get rid of all this old stuff,” I heard myself say out loud in a strange, cheerful voice, and I jabbed a large fork into it. But I had to sit for several minutes breathing deeply with my head lowered before I managed to dump the lamb into the garbage can along with the tray of dough bits and get myself back into bed, where I stayed for the rest of the day.

The next afternoon, it seemed to me that I was ready to go out of the apartment. I took a hot bath, cleansing myself carefully. Then I looked through my clothing, taking it out and putting it away, piece by piece. None of the things I’d brought with me seemed right. Steam poured from the radiators, but the veil of warmth hardly softened the little pointed particles of cold in the room.

The hall closet was full of women’s clothes, and there I found everything I needed. I supposed it all belonged to Micheline, but everything felt roomy enough, even though she looked so small. I selected a voluminous skirt, a turtleneck jersey, and a long, heavy sweater. There was a pair of boots as well—beautiful boots, fine-grained and sleek. If they belonged to Micheline, they must have been a gift. Surely she never would have chosen them for herself.

The woman who stood in the mirror was well assembled, but the face, above the heavy, dark clothing, was indistinct in the brilliant sunlight. I made up my eyes heavily, and then my mouth with a red lipstick that was sitting on Ivan’s bureau, and checked back with the mirror. Much better. Then I found a jacket that probably belonged to Ivan, and a large shawl, which I arranged around my head and shoulders.

Outside, everything was outlined in a fluid brilliance, and underfoot the snow emitted an occasional dry shriek. The air was as thin as if it might break, fracturing the landscape along which I walked: broad, flat-roofed buildings with blind windows, low upon the endless sky. There were other figures against the landscape, all bundled up like myself against the cold, and although the city was still unfathomable, I could recall no other place, and the rudiments of a past seemed to be hidden here for me somewhere, beyond my memory.

I entered a door and was plunged into noise and activity. I was in a supermarket arranged like a hallucination, with aisles shooting out in unexpected directions, and familiar and unfamiliar items perched side by side. If only I had made a list! I held my cart tightly, trusting the bright packages to draw me along correctly and guide me in my selections.

The checkout girl rang up my purchases: eggs (oh, I’d forgotten butter; well, no matter, the eggs could always be boiled, or used in something); a replacement roll of frozen cookie dough; a box of spaghetti; a jar of pickled okra from Texas; a package of mint tea; foil; soap powder; cleanser; violet toilet paper (an item I’d never seen before); and a bottle of aspirin. The girl took my money, glancing at me.

Several doors along, I stopped at a little shop filled with pastries. There were trays of jam tarts and buns, and plates piled up with little chocolate diamond shapes, and pyramids of caramelized spheres, and shelves of croissants and tortes and cookies, and the most wonderful aroma surged around me. “Madame?” said a woman in white behind the counter.

I looked up at her, over a shelf of frosted cakes that held messages coded in French. On one of them a tiny bride and groom were borne down upon by shining sugar swans, and my heart fluttered high up against my chest like a routed moth. I spoke, though, resolutely in English: “Everything looks so good.” Surely that was an appropriate thing to say—surely people said that. “Wait.” I pointed at a tray of evergreen-shaped cookies covered with green sugar crystals. Tiny bright candies had been placed on them at intervals to simulate ornaments. “There.”