The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (81 page)

“Fine, certainly, good,” Lucien said, already gabbling; he would have agreed to anything if Rose would only hang up.

“But whatever you do,” she added, “please, please, under no circumstances should you let him know that we asked you to call.”

Lucien looked at the receiver incredulously. “But how else would I have known he was in New York?” he said. “How else would I have gotten his number?”

There was a silence, and then a brief, amazed laugh from Isaac on another extension. “Well, I don’t know what you’ll tell him,” Isaac said admiringly. “But you’re the brains of the family, you’ll think of something.”

Innocence

And actually, Russell (who seems to be not only Amity’s friend and possible suitor but also her agent) has obtained for Amity a whopping big advance from some outfit that Madison refers to as Cheeseball Editions, so whatever else they might all be drinking to (or drinking about) naturally Amity’s celebrating a bit. And Russell, recently arrived from L.A., cannot suppress his ecstasy about how
ur
New York, as he puts it, Mr. Matsumoto’s loft is, tactless as he apparently recognizes this untimely ecstasy to be.

“It’s
fantastic
,” he says. “Who did it, do you know?”

Nathaniel nods. “Matthias Lehmann.”

“That’s what I thought, I thought so,” Russell says. “It
looks
like Lehmann. Oh, wow, I can’t believe you guys have to move out—I mean, it’s just so totally amazing!”

Nathaniel and Madison nod and Lyle sniffs peevishly. Lyle is stretched out on a yoga mat that Nathaniel once bought in preparation for a romance (as yet manqué) with a prettily tattoed yoga teacher he runs into in the bodega on the corner. Lyle’s skin has a waxy, bluish cast; there are dark patches beneath his eyes. He looks like a child too precociously worried to sleep. His boyfriend, Jahan, has more or less relocated to London, and Lyle has been missing him frantically. Lying there so still on the yoga mat with his eyes closed, he appears to be a tomb sculpture from an as yet nonexistent civilization.

“And the view!” Russell says. “This is probably the most incredible view on the
planet
.”

The others consider the sight of Russell’s eager face. And then Amity says, “More champagne, anyone?”

Well, sure, who knows where Russell had been? Who knows where he would have been on that shining, calm, perfectly blue September morning when the rest of them were here having coffee on the terrace and looked up at the annoying racket of a low-flying plane? Why should they expect Russell—now, nearly three years later—to imagine that moment out on the terrace when Lyle spilled his coffee and said, “Oh, shit,” and something flashed and something tore, and the cloudless sky ignited.

Home

Rose and Isaac have elbowed their way in behind Charlie, and no matter how forcefully Lucien tries to boot them out, they’re making themselves at home, airing their dreary history.

Both sailed as tiny, traumatized children with their separate families and on separate voyages right into the Statue of Liberty’s open arms. Rose was almost eleven when her little sister, Charlie, came into being, along with a stainless American birth certificate.

Neither Rose and Charlie’s parents nor Isaac’s ever recovered from their journey to the New World, to say nothing of what had preceded it. The two sets of old folks spoke, between them, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Rumanian, Latvian, Czech, and Hungarian, Charlie had once told Lucien, but not one of the four ever managed to learn more English than was needed to procure a quarter pound of smoked sturgeon from the deli. They worked impossible hours, they drank a little schnapps, and then, in due course, they died.

Isaac did fairly well manufacturing vacuum cleaners. He and Rose were solid members of their temple and the community, but, according to Charlie, no matter how uneventful their lives in the United States continued to be, filling out an unfamiliar form would cause Isaac’s hands to sweat and send jets of acid through his innards. When he or Rose encountered someone in uniform—a train conductor, a meter maid, a crossing guard—their hearts would leap into their throats and they would think:
passport
!

Their three elder sons, Nathaniel’s brothers, fulfilled Rose and Isaac’s deepest hopes by turning out to be blindingly inconspicuous. The boys were so reliable and had so few characteristics it was hard to imagine what anyone could think up to kill them for. They were Jewish, of course, but even Rose and Isaac understood that this particular criterion was inoperative in the United States—at least for the time being.

The Old World, danger, and poverty were far in the past. Nevertheless, the family lived in their tidy, midwestern house with its two-car garage as if secret police were permanently hiding under the matching plastic-covered sofas, as if Brown-shirts and Cossacks were permanently rampaging through the suburban streets.

Lucien knew precious little about vacuum cleaners and nothing at all about childhood infections or lawn fertilizers. And yet, as soon as Charlie introduced him, Isaac and Rose set about soliciting his views as if he were an authority on everything that existed on their shared continent.

His demurrals, disclaimers, and protestations of ignorance were completely in effective. whatever guess he was finally strong-armed into hazarding was received as oracular. Oracular!

Fervent gratitude was expressed: Thank God Charlie had brought Lucien into the family! How brilliant he was, how knowledgeable and subtle! And then Rose and Isaac would proceed to pick over his poor little opinion as if they were the most ruthless and highly trained lawyers, and on the opposing side.

After Charlie was diagnosed, Lucien had just enough time to understand perfectly what that was to mean. When he was exhausted enough to sleep, he slept as though under heavy anesthetic during an amputation. The pain was not alleviated, but it had been made inscrutable. A frightful thing seemed to lie on top of him, heavy and cold. All night long he would struggle to throw it off, but when dawn delivered him to consciousness, he understood what it was, and that it would never go away.

During his waking hours, the food on his plate would abruptly lose its taste, the painting he was studying would bleach off the canvas, the friend he was talking to would turn into a stranger. And then, one day, he was living in a world all made out of paper, where the sun was a wad of old newspapers and the only sounds were the sounds of tearing paper.

He spoke with Rose and Isaac frequently during Charlie’s illness, and they came to New York for her memorial service, where they sat self-consciously and miserably among Lucien and Charlie’s attractive friends. He took them to the airport for their return to the Midwest, embraced them warmly, and as they shuffled toward the departure door with the other passengers, turning once to wave, he breathed a sigh of relief: all that, at least, was over, too.

As his senses began to revive, he felt a brief pang—he would miss, in a minor way, the heartrending buffoonery of Charlie’s sister and brother-in-law. After all, it had been part of his life with Charlie, even if it had been the only annoying part.

But Charlie’s death, instead of setting him utterly, blessedly adrift in his grief, had left him anchored permanently off shore of her family like an island. After a long silence, the infuriating calls started up again. The feudal relationship was apparently inalterable.

Context

When they’d moved in, it probably
was
the best view on the planet. Then, one morning, out of a clear blue sky, it became, for a while, probably the worst.

For a long time now they’ve been able to hang out here on the terrace without anyone running inside to be sick or bursting into tears or diving under something at a loud noise or even just making macabre jokes or wondering what sort of debris is settling into their drinks. These days they rarely see—as for a time they invariably did—the sky igniting, the stinking smoke bursting out of it like lava, the tiny figures raining down from the shattered tower as Lyle faints.

But now it’s unclear what they are, in fact, looking at.

Information

What would Charlie say about the show that’s about to go up? It’s work by a youngish Belgian painter who arrived, splashily, on the scene sometime after Charlie’s departure.

It’s good work, but these days Lucien can’t get terribly excited about any of the shows. The vibrancy of his brain arranging itself in response to something of someone else’s making, the heart’s little leap—his gift, reliable for so many years, is gone. Or mostly gone; it’s flattened out into something banal and tepid. It’s as if he’s got some part that’s simply worn out and needs replacing. Let’s hope it’s still available, he thinks.

How
did
he get so old? The usual stupid question. One had snickered all one’s life as the plaintive old geezers doddered about baffled, as if looking for a misplaced sock, tugging one’s sleeve, asking sheepishly:
How did I get so old?

The mere sight of one’s patiently blank expression turned them vicious.
It will happen to you,
they’d raged.

Well, all right, it would. But not in the ridiculous way it had happened to
them
. And yet, here he is, he and his friends, falling like so much landfill into the dump of old age. Or at least struggling desperately to balance on the brink. Yet one second ago, running so swiftly toward it, they hadn’t even seen it.

And what had happened to his youth? Unlike a misplaced sock, it isn’t anywhere; it had dissolved in the making of him.

Surprising that after Charlie’s death he did not take the irreversible step. He’d had no appetite to live. But the body has its own appetite, apparently—that pitiless need to continue with its living, which has so many disguises and so many rationales.

A deep embarrassment has been stalking him. Every time he lets his guard down these days, there it is. Because it’s become clear: he and even the most dissolute among his friends have glided through their lives on the assumption that the sheer fact of their existence has in some way made the world a better place. As deranged as it sounds now, a better place. Not a leafy bower, maybe, but still, a somewhat better place—more tolerant, more amenable to the wonderful adventures of the human mind and the human body, more capable of outrage against injustice…

For shame! One has been shocked, all one’s life, to learn of the blind eye turned to children covered with bruises and welts, the blind eye turned to the men who came at night for the neighbors. And yet…And yet one has clung to the belief that the sun shining inside one’s head is evidence of sunshine elsewhere.

Not everywhere, of course. Obviously, at every moment something terrible is being done to someone somewhere—one can’t really know about each instance of it!

Then again, how far away does something have to be before you have the right to not really know about it?

Sometime after Charlie’s death, Lucien resumed throwing his parties. He and his friends continued to buy art and make art, to drink and reflect. They voted responsibly, they gave to charity, they read the paper assiduously. And while they were basking in their exclusive sunshine, what had happened to the planet? Lucien gazes at his glass of wine, his eyes stinging.

Homesick

Nathaniel was eight or nine when his aunt and uncle had come out to the Midwest to visit the family, lustrous and clever and comfortable and humorous and affectionate with one another, in their soft, stylish clothing. They’d brought books with them to read. When they talked to each other—and they habitually did—not only did they take turns, but also, what
one
said followed on what the
other
said. What world could they have come from? What was the world in which beings like his aunt and uncle could exist?

A world utterly unlike his parents’, that was for sure—a world of freedom and lightness and beauty and the ardent exchange of ideas and…and…
fun
.

A great longing rose up in Nathaniel like a flower with a lovely, haunting fragrance. When he was ready, he’d thought—when he was able, when he was worthy, he’d get to the world from which his magic aunt and uncle had once briefly appeared.

The evidence, though, kept piling up that he was not worthy. Because even when he finished school, he simply didn’t budge. How unfair it was—his friends had flown off so easily, as if going to New York were nothing at all.

Immediately after graduation, Madison found himself a job at a fancy New York PR firm. And it seemed that there was a place out there on the trading floor of the Stock Exchange for Amity. And Lyle had suddenly exhibited an astonishing talent for sound design and engineering, so where else would he sensibly live, either?

Yes, the fact was that only Nathaniel seemed slated to remain behind in their college town. Well, he told himself, his parents were getting on; he would worry, so far away. And he was actually employed as a part-time assistant with an actual architectural firm, whereas in New York the competition, for even the lowliest of such jobs, would be ferocious. And also, he had plenty of time, living where he did, to work on
Passivityman
.

And that’s what he told Amity, too, when she’d called one night, four years ago, urging him to take the plunge.

“It’s time for you to try, Nathaniel,” she said. “It’s time to commit. This oddball, slacker stance is getting kind of old, don’t you think, kind of stale. You cannot let your life be ruled by fear any longer.”

“Fear?” He flinched. “By what fear, exactly, do you happen to believe my life is ruled?”