The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg by Deborah Eisenberg

with men. I was finding that you have to get to know someone a bit in order to become interested in getting to know him at all, and that was such a bore! The same questions, the same little conversations, over and over: Were you close to your father? Just think—so, you, too, as a child, were afraid of getting hit by the baseball! Tell me, do you really believe that it’s possible to rid oneself of unconscious concerns over fuel costs when discussing our Middle Eastern policies? And so on and so forth—just like having to slog through those statistics courses in college before being allowed to register for Abnormal Personality. I did go out now and again, of course, but in a perfunctory, frog-kissing sort of spirit, and a frog, in my experience, is a frog to the finish.
    My own love life, at that time, then, provided me with no information to sort through—nothing to think about or try to get in order. It was as useful to the production of conversation as disappearing ink is to the production of literature, and so I began to tap, for all it was worth, that skill which one develops during adolescence, of turning to account the love lives of one’s friends. And since among my friends Rafe had always tended to have the most multiform and highly colored love life, I looked forward most to seeing him.
    Sadly, though, he had become quite uncooperative since he’d taken up with Heather. He rarely put in an appearance, and when he did, he just sat around lumpishly and quaffed down great quantities of my expensive Scotch.
    “How are you these days, Rafe?” I would say.
    “Fine,” he would say, with a remote, childish formality. “Just fine.”
    “Yes? How’s everything going?” I would say.
    “Oh, fine, thanks. Very well.”
    “Good…And how’s Heather?”
    “Oh, she’s quite well. Just fine. Say, you don’t have any more of that Scotch, do you? It’s awfully good.”
    One evening he came over in a state of overt grumpiness. It seemed that he and Heather had had tickets to something, but Heather had been required on the spur of the moment to learn a huge new set of lines. “One of the guys in the show was in an accident today,” Rafe said, “so they have to do something about it.”
    “What can they do?” I said. “Either he was in an accident or he wasn’t, I’d think.”
    “What I mean,” Rafe said, “is that they’ll have to write him out of the story for a week or so. And then they’ll have to think of some reason why he’s in a cast from head to toe. It’s going to be pretty conspicuous, after all.”
    “Oh.—Yes.—I see. How awful. And rather eerie, for that matter. Will they think up some accident for him to have had in the script, do you suppose?”
    “I don’t know,” Rafe said. “It seems logical.”
    “You know,” I said, “a few weeks ago I happened to see the show, and this man whose name is Mr. Armstrong had this terrible cold. And somebody else said he’d gotten it from kissing his secretary, Tracy. And, you know, maybe the week before the actress that plays Tracy really had had a cold, come to think of it. But in any case the writers couldn’t have manufactured that guy’s runny nose.”
    “Yup. Part of the credit for that cold just has to go to the ultimate scriptwriter, doesn’t it?” Rafe yawned, bored by his own cliché. “Hey, speaking of the determining hand, you’re just about winding up this year’s work, right?”
    “Yes,” I said. The panel was reviewing each other’s recommendations all that month. “We don’t start up again for a while. But to tell you the truth,” I confessed, “I’ve been thinking about getting into publishing instead of going on with the foundation.”
    “Oh,” Rafe said.
    “‘Oh’? Is that all? I thought you’d be pleased.”
    “Why?” Rafe said. “That is, I have no objection, but why did you think I’d be pleased, particularly?”
    “I thought you disapproved of what I do.”
    “I don’t,” Rafe said. “I