« In Which You Can Shelter Me And I Will Shelter You »

from Journal

by LEONARD MICHAELS

The distance between us is neither long nor short, merely imperishable, like the sentiment in an old song.

My neighbor is building his patio, laying bricks meticulously. The sun beats on him. Heats rises off the bricks into his face. I'm in here writing. He'll have built a patio. I'll be punished.

Deborah wants to have her eyes fixed so they'll look like white eyes and she hates her landlady who gave her the Etna Street apartment, choosing her over 157 other applicants. Her landlady assumed Deborah is a good girl, clean and quiet. "A Japanese angel," says Deborah with a sneer. I was shocked by her racism. I hadn't imagined she thought of herself as Japanese. She showed me photos of her family. Mother, father, brothers, sister — all Japanese, but I hadn't supposed she thought she was, too. What the hell did I imagine? Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxury that makes you deeply stupid.

Evelyn told me that Sally, her dearest friend — "Don't ever repeat this!" — came down with the worst case of herpes she'd ever seen.

Feelings swarm in Eddie's face, innumerable nameless nuances, like lights on the ocean beneath a sky of racing clouds. Eddie could have been a novelist or poet. He has emotional abundance, fluency of self. He's shameless. "Believe me, I'm not a faithful type. I've slept with a hundred women. More. But it's no use. She hits me, curses me. She says 'I don't want to be touched. I don't want to be turned on.' No matter. It begins to happen. She relaxes, lets me disgrace myself. She tells me, 'Lick the insides of my legs while I make this phone call.' My father slaves six days a week, year after year, just to put me through medical school. For me to do this, to lick this woman, he went to an early grave."

Margaret tells me her lover is wonderful. "He makes me feel like a woman," she says, "without degrading me." I don't know what she means, but can't ask. What is it to feel like a woman? or to be made to feel that way?

Sonny was six years old when she went up on a roof with a boy. He pulled down his pants. She pulled down hers. They looked. Years later she still worried about what she'd done, thinking she could never be famous because the boy would tell everybody she'd pulled her pants down. She was a success in school and had innumerable boyfriends. None of that changed anything for her. At the age of six, in a thoughtless moment, she ruined her life.

It was cold, beginning to rain. Deborah was afraid she wouldn't find a taxi. She'd have to walk for blocks in the rain. She didn't want to go, but her psychotherapist wasn't charging her anything. A few months back, she told him she couldn't afford to continue. He lowered the rate to half. Even that became too much for her, so he lowered it to nothing. She stood, collected her things, and pulled on her coat like a kid taking orders from her mother, then fussed with her purse, her scarf, trying to be efficient but making dozens of extra little moves, rebuttoning, untying and retying her scarf, and then reopening her purse to be sure there was enough money for a taxi if she could find one. She wanted to stay, to talk more, but couldn't not go to her psychotherapist. She felt he really needed her.

I told Sonny I love her. She said, "I'm a sucker for love."

Leonard Michaels is the senior contributor to This Recording. He died in 2003. You can find the first four entries in Leonard Michaels' Journal here, here, and here, and here.

"Left Bank" - Air (mp3)

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art by Jake Longstreth