The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (80 page)

And once you had—do you know?—I calmed right down. I stopped shaking, and that blinding silence dimmed. I raised my head and opened my eyes. There was the world, all around me—the sky, the earth, a bird, a voice…

Did it ever occur to you to wonder what happened when Sándor came back? Well, he looked around mildly for a moment, and he asked how I was. I realized I was holding a book you’d stuck in my hands when you’d gone in to see Lili. I was fine, I said. And Lili? What about Lili? And Lili was fine, too.

Sándor glanced at Lili’s door. “She’s all right,” I said. “Really. She’s fine.”

“Yes?” he said, and hesitated. “Well. So, what would you say to a movie?”

Lili was perfectly serene when I came in for breakfast the next morning—as serene as you found her when you eventually joined us yourself, looking disheveled and mightily confused. I hope I didn’t snicker, Peter, when she said she was glad you’d stuck around, that there was a lot of cleaning up to do.

You, though! You were really insufferable, there, for a while, were you aware of that? I don’t know who you thought you were—my brother? my father?

I suppose you were just panicked, really. These days no one bothers even to remark on a very young man and an older woman, but it certainly was a novelty back then.

With all due respect, Peter, I have to say that I don’t really attribute Lili’s happiness in those days to any individual qualities of yours; no doubt any pretentious twenty-one-year-old Hungarian would have done as well.

But I very much doubt that anyone else at all could have parlayed, as you eventually did, some translations and what amounted to a small essay into so much celebrity for Sándor (and celebrity, consequently, my point is, for…well, you get my point, I’m sure).

Of course it was just one of those moments, wasn’t it, when attention was on such things, when even writing as rarified as Sándor’s was likely to be hijacked—and by just about anyone. Absolutely every poor shnook seemed to be out there scrounging up some piece of art with which to beat up some ideological adversary or intellectual competitor, something that could be said to validate some thesis, or buttress some argument, or represent some something or other—an indictment of totalitarianism, or an indictment of repressive capitalism, or these particular currents of psychoanalytic thought, or those particular currents of Marxist thought, or an esthetic of the elite, or an esthetic of the people, or currents of Jewish mysticism, or an expression of Christian acceptance, or an expression of Buddhist acceptance…

Now, of course, no one wants art for any purpose whatsoever—let alone for its own. But that was the moment, wasn’t it? And you seemed to have a perfect understanding of just how to exploit it, how to take it all as far as possible. Something so very exactly what Sándor never wanted.

Hypocrite, you say; ingrate—
Goneril
couldn’t have put it better. What do I think you should have done? Surely I can’t mean to vilify you for having had a few
thoughts
about work to which you were so devoted! And don’t I think a readership deserves something useful in return for its admiration? Besides, anyone whose stance (like Sándor’s) is fastidious high-mindedness is simply demanding that others be exploitative on his behalf. Also, who am I to say that you
were
in any way exploitative? Were you not, in fact, entirely sincere in your efforts to bring Sándor’s work to a wider and more receptive audience?

Did it mean nothing to Sándor to make contact with the living? Or that his lyric, glimmering salvagings from a lost world were received with deep gratitude? Did it mean nothing to Lili that her life, too, was in some measure reclaimed? What did I wish for them—that they be eternally voiceless, adrift? Plus, where did I think my tuition came from, and how did I think I would have gotten into college in the first place, the way I’d been going on without you?

All right, I give up, you win, thanks. But
Sándor
? A
bastion
against
Communism
? Oh, please, Peter. For shame.

A paradox, as Sándor once said; a conundrum. If no one was listening, at least no one misheard you. If what you made was of no value to anyone, no one stole it and went running off; no one bothered to colonize it and set up little flags. It was his home, he said, his work, and all
I’m
saying is that it seems very hard, that a man who was exiled so many times over was harried again, and in his most intimate refuge.

I’m not going so far as to say it killed him, Peter. Of course not! It merely exasperated him; obviously it was his
life
that killed him.

Some months, I suppose, after you’d more or less dropped out of sight, I was just sitting idly, in our apartment, gazing out the window at the dark sky and dreary rain, and I saw the reflection of Lili’s face overlap mine as Lili came and sat down next to me. “Poor Anna,” she said. “Do you miss Peter?”

I shook my head.

“No,” she said, and in the window I watched drops of rain trickle unevenly over our reflections as Lili stroked my hair. “Good. Well, I don’t miss him, either.”

Naturally, no liaison between you and Lili could have lasted forever. That was understood. You were very young—Sándor and Lili were careful to impress this notion on me; your life was moving very fast.

But still, you might have come around a little more often, Peter. Lili would have liked to see you, you know. After all, you were family.

Enjoyable, and even appropriate as it is, to mock Lionel, I do have to say that in a way I’m not horrified through and
through
that he arranged yesterday’s service the way he did. I certainly wouldn’t have done it, myself, but I wasn’t entirely sorry, I must admit, to see that dark, strange, creaky, stained-glass spaceship swoop down through the millennia to reclaim Lili. Though it was impossible, of course, to say anything of the sort to Lionel when I got up this morning, and there he was, first thing, in the kitchen.

Fortunately, he didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see him. To Lionel, obviously, every presence is a presence that isn’t Lili. He fussed around making a breakfast, and both of us pretended to eat it, and then Eric called, to see how we were doing, and to say again how sorry he was he couldn’t be here with us.

“I hope he knows,” Lionel said, after we hung up, “how many people loved his grandmother.”

It
is
a beautiful day, isn’t it? Lionel was right. Not warm, certainly, but just so bright! The benches along the avenue are filling up with old men and old women, sitting out in the sun—do you remember?—just the way they used to all those years ago.

When I visit Eric in Los Angeles, he takes me driving way out, to those elastic, self-generating peripheries, where the most recent immigrants are hoping to establish a life for themselves, and I marvel at everything, as though we were coasting down into the future.

Ma, Eric says, not every manicurist or waiter here used to be the most promising poet or physicist in Nigeria or Guatemala or Korea, you know.

Well, yes. I do know. But a few of them must have been something of the sort. And then, the point is, what about the others?

These old men and women have probably been coming out in the spring for half a century to sit on the very same benches. They’re probably the very same people I used to see around here in my childhood. And let me tell you, Peter, they looked every bit as old to me then as they do now!

They’re like little birds, perched on a phone wire, cheeping away from time to time in a sheer exercise of being alive, blinking in the indifferent American sun. They sit in the sun, they buy their few groceries, they play chess, they gossip. A few of them must get themselves to an occasional chamber-music concert. I suppose they still read their newspapers in Yiddish, in Polish, in Hungarian, in Czech…This spring, the next spring, maybe one more…

The elevated train still clatters by in the distance, and the old people gaze out through the traffic and fumes as if they were gazing across the Atlantic. If the great empires of Europe exist anywhere now, I guess it’s right here, on these benches.

He seems to be a nice man, Eric, and I think things are working out pretty well for him. Neil was a very good father, I have to say, for what it’s worth. Neil, in fact, is not such a bad human being—he and I just have various complementary horrible qualities. I, obviously, am possessive, jealous, resentful, dependent, quick to censure, slow to forgive…and there’s not all that much I’ve been able to do about it, I’m afraid, other than keep my distance. On my own, in fact, I’m perfectly all right.

I
am
grateful, Peter (and if we’d had that cup of coffee yesterday, I hope I would have told you so) for the few sentences in your book that pertain to Lili. Because her mother’s jewelry, the silver, the piano, the house—all that stuff must have belonged to the neighbors for a long time now. Or, actually, I suppose, to their children. Except what’s just floating through Europe these days, from one antique dealer to another.

So, aside from those few sentences of yours, what’s left? The challis scarf, a few strings of beads, some inexpensive furniture, bought on Lili’s small salary or given to her by those admirers of hers, or organized by some relocation agency or charity…That’s pretty much it.

Yes, so obviously I’m grateful. Well, I’m sure you know that.

I hope you’d be glad to know that I’m well—that I’m fortunate in my work, that I’m happy enough…

The time Neil told me he’d seen the talk show where there was someone who might have been the person he thought I’d mentioned, I asked him so many questions!
What did he look like? What was he saying? Did he say where he was living?
And I must have sounded frantic, because Neil stopped answering and just looked at me. He didn’t know, he said slowly; he hadn’t been paying attention. He’d simply
happened
to turn the show on while he was rummaging around in his suitcase for a presentable shirt, and he couldn’t remember one single thing about whoever it was he’d happened to see.

Oh, I said, after a moment. Well. And I turned away to escape Neil’s stare. There was really no need to have seen you myself; I knew it was you, and at least I knew you were safe.

Profound thanks and a big hug from me, too, to the D.A.D.D., Berline, and Joachim Sartorius; profound thanks and respectful salutes to both the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and thanks, hugs, and salutes to Amy Hotch, Andras Nagy, and Libby Titus.

For my darling Wall

Nathaniel Recalls the Miracle

The grandchildren approach.

Nathaniel can make them out dimly in the shadows. When it’s time, he’ll tell them about the miracle.

It was the dawn of the new millennium
, he’ll say.
I was living in the Midwest back then, but my friends from college persuaded me to come to New York.

I arrived a few days ahead of the amazing occasion, and all over the city there was an atmosphere of feverish anticipation. The year two thousand! The new millennium! Some people thought it was sure to be the end of the world. Others thought we were at the threshold of something completely new and better. The tabloids carried wild predictions from celebrity clairvoyants, and even people who scoffed and said that the date was an arbitrary and meaningless one were secretly agitated. In short, we were suddenly aware of ourselves standing there, staring at the future blindfolded.

I suppose, looking back on it, that all the commotion seems comical and ridiculous. And perhaps you’re thinking that we churned it up to entertain ourselves because we were bored or because our lives felt too easy—trivial and mundane. But consider: ceremonial occasions, even purely personal ones like birthdays or anniversaries, remind us that the world is full of terrifying surprises and no one knows what even the very next second will bring!

Well, shortly before the momentous day, a strange news item appeared: experts were saying that a little mistake had been made—just one tiny mistake, a little detail in the way computers everywhere had been programmed. But the consequences of this detail, the experts said, were potentially disastrous; tiny as it was, the detail might affect everybody, and in a very big way!

You see, if history has anything to teach us, it’s that—despite all our efforts, despite our best (or worst) intentions, despite our touchingly indestructible faith in our own foresight—we poor humans cannot actually think ahead; there are just too many variables. And so, when it comes down to it, it always turns out that no one is in charge of the things that really matter.

It must be hard for you to imagine—it’s even hard for me to remember—but people hadn’t been using computers for very long. As far as I know, my mother (your great-grandmother) never even touched one! And no one had thought to inform the computers that one day the universe would pass from the years of the one thousands into the years of the two thousands. So the machines, as these experts suddenly realized, were not equipped to understand that at the conclusion of 1999 time would not start over from 1900, time would keep going.

People all over America—all over the world!—began to speak of “a crisis of major proportions” (which was a phrase we used to use back then). Because, all the routine operations that we’d so blithely delegated to computers, the operations we all took for granted and depended on—how would they proceed?

Might one be fatally trapped in an elevator? Would we have to huddle together for warmth and scrabble frantically through our pockets for a pack of fancy restaurant matches so we could set our stacks of old
New York Review
s ablaze? Would all the food rot in heaps out there on the highways, leaving us to pounce on fat old street rats and grill them over the flames? What was going to happen to our bank accounts—would they vaporize? And what about air traffic control? On December 31 when the second hand moved from 11:59:59 to midnight, would all the airplanes in the sky collide?

Everyone was thinking of more and more alarming possibilities. Some people committed their last night on this earth to partying, and others rushed around buying freeze-dried provisions and cases of water and flashlights and radios and heavy blankets in the event that the disastrous problem might somehow eventually be solved.

And then, as the clock ticked its way through the enormous gatherings in celebration of the era that was due to begin in a matter of hours, then minutes, then seconds, we waited to learn the terrible consequences of the tiny oversight. Khartoum, Budapest, Paris—we watched on television, our hearts fluttering, as midnight, first just a tiny speck in the east, unfurled gently, darkening the sky and moving toward us over the globe.

But the amazing thing,
Nathaniel will tell his grandchildren,
was that nothing happened! We held our breath…And there was nothing! It was a miracle. Over the face of the earth, from east to west and back again, nothing catastrophic happened at all.

Oh, well. Frankly, by the time he or any of his friends get around to producing a grandchild (or even a child, come to think of it) they might well have to explain what computers had been. And freeze-dried food. And celebrity clairvoyants and airplanes and New York and America and even cities, and heaven only knows what.

Frogboil

Lucien watches absently as his assistant, Sharmila, prepares to close up the gallery for the evening; something keeps tugging at his attention…

Oh, yes. It’s the phrase Yoshi Matsumoto used this morning when he called from Tokyo.
Back to normal
…
Back to normal
…

What’s that famous, revolting, sadistic experiment? Something like, you drop the frog into a pot of boiling water and it jumps out. But if you drop it into a pot of cold water and slowly bring the water to a boil, the frog stays put and gets boiled.

Itami Systems is reopening its New York branch, was what Matsumoto called to tell Lucien; he’ll be returning to the city soon. Lucien pictured his old friend’s mournful, ironic expression as he added, “They tell me they’re ‘exploring additional avenues of development now that New York is back to normal.’”

Lucien had made an inadvertent squawklike sound. He shook his head, then he shook his head again.

“Hello?” Matsumoto said.

“I’m here,” Lucien said. “Well, it’ll be good to see you again. But steel yourself for a wait at customs; they’re fingerprinting.”

View

Mr. Matsumoto’s loft is a jungle of big rubbery trees, under which crouch sleek items of chrome and leather. Spindly electronic devices blink or warble amid the foliage, and here and there one comes upon an immense flat-screen TV—the first of their kind that Nathaniel ever handled.

Nathaniel and his friends have been subletting—thanks, obviously, to Uncle Lucien—for a ridiculously minimal rent and on Mr. Matsumoto’s highly tolerable conditions of cat-sitting and general upkeep. Nathaniel and Lyle and Amity and Madison each have something like an actual bedroom, and there are three whole bathrooms, one equipped with a Jacuzzi. The kitchen, stone and steel, has cupboards bigger than most of their friends’ apartments. Art—important, soon to be important, or very recently important, most of which was acquired from Uncle Lucien—hangs on the walls.

And the terrace! One has only to open the magic sliding panel to find oneself halfway to heaven. On the evening, over three years ago, when Uncle Lucien completed the arrangements for Nathaniel to sublet and showed him the place, Nathaniel stepped out onto the terrace and tears shot right up into his eyes.

There was that unearthly palace, the Chrysler Building! There was the Empire State Building, like a brilliant violet hologram! There were the vast, twinkling prairies of Brooklyn and New Jersey! And best of all, Nathaniel could make out the Statue of Liberty holding her torch aloft, as she had held it for each of his parents when they arrived as children from across the ocean—terrified, filthy, and hungry—to safety.

Stars glimmered nearby; towers and spires, glowing emerald, topaz, ruby, sapphire, soared below. The avenues and bridges slung a trembling net of light across the rivers, over the buildings. Everything was spangled and dancing; the little boats glittered. The lights floated up and up like bubbles.

Back when Nathaniel moved into Mr. Matsumoto’s loft, shortly after his millennial arrival in New York, sitting out on the terrace had been like looking down over the rim into a gigantic glass of champagne.

Uncle Lucien’s Words of Reassurance

So, Matsumoto is returning. And Lucien has called Nathaniel, the nephew of his adored late wife, Charlie, to break the news.

Well, of course it’s hardly a catastrophe for the boy. Matsumoto’s place was only a sublet in any case, and Nathaniel and his friends will all find other apartments.

But it’s such an ordeal in this city. And all four of the young people, however different they might be, strike Lucien as being in some kind of holding pattern—as if they’re temporizing, or muffled by unspoken reservations. Of course, he doesn’t really know them. Maybe it’s just the eternal, poignant weariness of youth.

The strangest thing about getting old (or one of the many strangest things) is that young people sometimes appear to Lucien—as, in fact, Sharmila does at this very moment—in a nimbus of tender light. It’s as if her unrealized future were projecting outward like ectoplasm.

“Doing anything entertaining this evening?” he asks her.

She sighs. “Time will tell,” she says.

She’s a nice young woman; he’d like to give her a few words of advice, or reassurance.

But what could they possibly be? “Don’t—” he begins.

Don’t worry? HAHAHAHAHA! Don’t feel
sad
? “Don’t bother about the phones,” is what he settles down on. A new show goes up tomorrow, and it’s become Lucien’s custom on such evenings to linger in the stripped gallery and have a glass of wine. “I’ll take care of them.”

But how has he
gotten
so old?

Suspension

So, there was the famous, strangely blank New Year’s Eve, the nothing at all that happened, neither the apocalypse nor the failure of the planet’s computers, nor, evidently, the dawning of a better age. Nathaniel had gone to parties with his old friends from school and was asleep before dawn; the next afternoon he awoke with only a mild hangover and an uneasy impression of something left undone.

Next thing you knew, along came that slump, as it was called—the general economic blight that withered the New York branch of Mr. Matsumoto’s firm and clusters of jobs all over the city. There appeared to be no jobs at all, in fact, but then—somehow—Uncle Lucien unearthed one for Nathaniel in the architectural division of the subway system. It was virtually impossible to afford an apartment, but Uncle Lucien arranged for Nathaniel to sublet Mr. Matsumoto’s loft.

Then Madison and his girlfriend broke up, so Madison moved into Mr. Matsumoto’s, too. Not long afterward, the brokerage house where Amity was working collapsed resoundingly, and she’d joined them. Then Lyle’s landlord jacked up his rent, so Lyle started living at Mr. Matsumoto’s as well.

As the return of Mr. Matsumoto to New York was contingent upon the return of a reasonable business climate, one way or another it had sort of slipped their minds that Mr. Matsumoto was real. And for over three years there they’ve been, hanging in temporary splendor thirty-one floors above the pavement.

They’re all out on the terrace this evening. Madison has brought in champagne so that they can salute with an adequate flourish the end of their tenure in Mr. Matsumoto’s place. And except for Amity, who takes a principled stand against thoughtful moods, and Amity’s new friend or possibly suitor, Russell, who has no history here, they’re kind of quiet.

Reunion

Now that Sharmila has gone, Lucien’s stunning, cutting-edge gallery space blurs a bit and recedes. The room, in fact, seems almost like an old snapshot from that bizarre, quaintly futuristic century, the twentieth. Lucien takes a bottle of white wine from the little fridge in the office, pours himself a glass, and from behind a door in that century, emerges Charlie.

Charlie
—Oh, how long it’s been, how unbearably long! Lucien luxuriates in the little pulse of warmth just under his skin that indicates her presence. He strains for traces of her voice, but her words degrade like the words in a dream, as if they’re being rubbed through a sieve.

Yes, yes, Lucien assures her. He’ll put his mind to finding another apartment for her nephew. And when her poor, exasperating sister and brother-in-law call frantically about Nathaniel, as they’re bound to do, he’ll do his best to calm them down.

But what a nuisance it all is! The boy is as opaque to his parents as a turnip. He was the child of their old age and he’s also, obviously, the repository of all of their baroque hopes and fears. By their own account, they throw up their hands and wring them, lecture Nathaniel about frugality, then press spending money upon him and fret when he doesn’t use it.

Between Charlie’s death and Nathaniel’s arrival in New York, Lucien heard from Rose and Isaac only at what they considered moments of emergency: Nathaniel’s grades were erratic! His friends were bizarre! Nathaniel had expressed an interest in architecture, an unreliable future! He drew, and Lucien had better sit down,
comics
!

The lamentations would pour through the phone, and then, the instant Lucien hung up, evaporate. But if he had given the matter one moment’s thought, he realizes, he would have understood from very early on that it was only a matter of time until the boy found his way to the city.

It was about four years ago now that Rose and Isaac put in an especially urgent call. Lucien held the receiver at arm’s length and gritted his teeth. “You’re an important man,” Rose was shouting. “We understand that, we understand how busy you are, you know we’d never do this, but it’s an emergency. The boy’s in New York, and he sounds terrible. He doesn’t have a job, lord only knows what he eats—I don’t know what to think, Lucien, he
drifts
, he’s just
drifting
. Call him, promise me, that’s all I’m asking.”