The Pavilion of Former Wives

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “It’s me,” he said, which produced a laugh.

  “Just a minute,” she said. He heard the door unlatch from the inside, followed by the scuffling of steps fading into the distance.

  “It’s open,” a faint voice called to him.

  When he stepped inside into her loft space—an extended room with a kitchen tucked into the far wall—his not-yet-third wife was in bed reading a magazine, or at least offering that impression. “I didn’t expect you,” she said. “I haven’t seen you in a while and I thought, you know, maybe he doesn’t want to see me.”

  “I called to say I was coming,” he said.

  “That’s true, you did,” she said. “I think there was something in the way you said it that made me think you wouldn’t come. Some reluctance, as if someone were holding on to you when you were talking to me.” She sighed with notable conviction. “Sweetheart, how long can you stay?” She held out a ghostly hand in his direction, which he only noticed as it was being withdrawn. B had been looking at his watch.

  “I have to go in about two hours,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the bed like a tourist.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said. “Lie next to me. I want to feel you. How else do I know you’re real?”

  The idea of making love to a stranger (Ms. Clover) performing the role of his former wife made him uncomfortable, though he had what he thought of as a commemorative hard-on. Moreover, the resemblance was compelling. He took off his shoes and got under the covers with her.

  “Please hold me,” she said.

  In the next moment, they were pressed against each other. She held onto him as if he were the only thing that kept her from drowning and eventually, his choices narrowing down, they fucked with a conflicting mix of caution and urgency.

  They exchanged fluids, songs, and vows of love not quite in that order.

  It was over and he still had an hour and a half left to his visit and so he asked her what she’d been up to.

  “I spend much of my time thinking about you making love to your wife,” she said. “I tend to focus on things that make me unhappy. Other than that…. You deny that there’s anything between you and I believe you, or try to believe you. I won’t say any more because I don’t want to be a nag, but it’s hard for me living like this. It feels unreal to me.”

  “I can see that,” he said. He wondered if it was possible to love someone and at the same time want desperately to get away from them.

  “I live for the times we get together,” she said.

  “It’s the same for me,” he said, and while they were hugging he noticed that he had fifty-five minutes left on the duration of his visit.

  “Would you like to go for a walk?” he asked.

  “Is that what you want to do? You were going to read me the first chapter of your novel.”

  “It isn’t quite finished,” he said.

  “So you didn’t bring it with you.”

  “No.”

  “I’m willing to look at it in an unfinished form.”

  “I’ll bring it next time I come.”

  “I don’t think we should see each other again until you’re free. I’ve been wanting to say that to you but it just seemed too hard not to see you. What do you think? When we come to each other, let’s do it without any baggage.”

  “It makes a kind of sense,” he said. He was still lying next to her and his prick indicated it was ready for another go. “It will be hard.”

  This was not the particular day of this otherwise memorable period in his life he had hoped to re-explore.

  “I don’t know if I can keep to it,” she said. “Do you think you can?”

  When he bent over to kiss her, she turned her head away. “One last time,” he said, kissing her ear to plead his case.

  “You’re going to have to be stronger than that,” she said. “We’re both going to have to be stronger to keep to our agreement.”

  He got out of bed and searched the floor for his clothes.

  “You don’t have to leave right away,” she said. “This may turn out to be our last time together. You still have some time left, don’t you?” She patted a spot on the bed, an invitation to return. He avoided looking at his watch, though he sensed his time was short in every sense. It was her habit to be seductive moments before he had to leave in the hope of prolonging his visit.

  He was going to say that it would have to be quick, but he censored himself to avoid provoking her displeasure. When he sat down on the bed she removed his blue-striped boxers, which he had only moments before reacquired. She went down on him, though barely long enough for his vacillating prick to reassert itself. Then she parted her legs like the red sea and he entered her like a grieving survivor with aggressive good faith and divided heart, an unacknowledged part of his consciousness wondering how he would explain himself on his belated return home. Eventually, aware of time’s unseemly haste, B rolled over to allow her the top position. She sang her song before he did and he made an effort to focus on his receding pleasure. “Are you all right, my love?” she asked, which was the question that brought him off.

  After a few moments of controlled impatience, he whispered that he really had to leave, as much as he would prefer staying with her. Had to leave.

  “Then stay,” she said, still on top of him, her arms around his neck.

  He was tired, he was beyond tired, but he released himself, kissed her on the top of her head, and slid out from under her.

  “It won’t kill you to stay a few minutes longer,” she said.

  “I can come by Friday morning, if that’s all right,” he said.

  “That’s not all right,” she said, holding onto him from the back as he tried to dress himself.

  “Then it’ll have to wait until Monday,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “We’ve agreed not to see each other until you’re free,” she said. “Isn’t that what we agreed?”

  When he got out the door, forty-seven minutes later than the time he had set himself earlier in the evening, he was almost pleased at the prospect of not seeing her again, until he remembered he had married her a year and a half after her resolve to stop seeing him and that they had actually lived together for twelve years.

  In the next moment, he was standing in front of the Pavilion booth, facing the prodigious Clover, who was prepared to take him on the third of his five allotted visits.

  “That’s okay,” he said to her. “I want to waive my rights to the other visits. I’ve had enough, though this is no reflection on your service. You people—” He wondered where the others were. “—were as good as your ad promised.” He shook her hand, not knowing how else to say goodbye.

  “Well, thank you for coming,” she said, handing him her card, which she said would serve as a rain check for his three unused visits to lost loves if he ever planned to return.

  When he got home—the traffic if anything slightly worse than it was on the trip out—his loneliness (his loneness) seemed an undervalued condition.

  He didn’t know whether to call it a date or not, but if it wasn’t a date, how else might it be described? Three weeks or so after his visit to the Pavilion, looking for something else among the debris on the top of his dresser, he stumbled on the card Ms. Clover had given him on his abrupt departure. There was a handwritten New York City phone number underneath the official Pavilion number, which he hadn’t noted before. It seemed like the kind of request any reasonable man would honor.

  They met at an obscure vegetarian restaurant in an unfashionable neighborhood a few blocks north of Soho.

  If some sadistic torturer were pulling out his fingernails one by one to elicit an answer, he still wouldn’t be able to say why he had phoned her or why, in the course of their conversation, he had suggested they meet for dinner. He might have confessed without conviction that his reasons lay somewhere in the nether territory between curiosity and loneliness.

  He was early—
it was his nature to be early—and he was stationed at a corner table with a view of the entrance, trying to remember what the person he was expecting might look like when she came through the door. Despite the vantage of his seat and his sense of being alert to whomever entered the restaurant, when a stylish younger woman not wearing glasses and claiming to be Julia Clover approached his table, he had not seen her coming. The brisk, familiar handshake before seating herself across from him was as close as she got to confirming her credentials.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said, trying to locate the face he knew within the face he didn’t without seeming to stare. “I don’t think I made a very good impression at the Pavilion. In fact, I’m sure I didn’t.”

  She shrugged and turned her attention to her menu. “If I thought you were hopeless, I wouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “Do you date many of your clients?” he asked, not so much interested in the answer as having something to say.

  “Virtually none,” she said.

  It was later, after they had ordered their meals and seemed to have gotten more comfortable with each other, that B asked the hitherto avoided question that he assumed was already in the air between them. “I suppose you wouldn’t want to tell me how you’re able on short notice to create such convincing scenes from your clients’ pasts. It’s very impressive.”

  “Thank you, I guess,” she said.

  “Have you trained as an actress?”

  “I never took any courses,” she said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  He meant no more than he asked and perhaps even less. “You don’t give away much,” he said. “You know a lot more about me than I know about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, who is Julia Clover?”

  She offered him a sly smile and held her arms out, framing the picture. “What you see is what there is. Do you want to know where I went to school? Is that what you want? Julia Clover, c’est moi.”

  B didn’t know what he wanted, but whatever it was he was not close to having it satisfied. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Older than I look,” she said. “And that’s not a very polite question.”

  Feeling thwarted, he thought to mention that the Ms. Clover at the Pavilion offered a very different impression than the Julia Clover in the fashionable black sweater sitting across from him, phrased and rephrased the observation so as not to give offense, but ended up swallowing whatever it was he had been chewing on.

  Moments after she had ordered dessert, she excused herself to go to the bathroom. He watched with grudging admiration as she moved among the tables toward the back of the restaurant, feeling an ache of loss at her impending absence.

  He knew instinctively that she would not return and regretted how badly he had handled their brief time together.

  So when she did return, it was as if he was being offered a second chance. A second chance for what, he wondered.

  He made conversation, told her things about himself she may not have known as she worked at her cranberry tart, circling the edges as she inched her way inside.

  After she had all she wanted, at least a third of it left for the kitchen, he paid the bill with an American Express card.

  They shook hands outside the restaurant as prelude to each going his or her own way, which in this case were divergent directions.

  He walked half a block, then turned around and called after her, “I intend to use my rain checks,” he shouted to her. “You’ll be seeing me again.”

  She seemed not to have heard him, took another few steps before turning to face him. In the next moment, she was running in his direction, her heels clacking like castanets against the pavement. For an untested moment, he thought of glancing behind him. Instead, he took a brief step in her direction and, filled with intimations of regret, a history of sinking ships flashing before his eyes, offered her his hand.

  ACTING OUT

  Now that Jay had agreed to the joint session with her therapist, Lois couldn’t remember why she had favored the idea in the first place. It was one of those things you did, which is what she told Lorrie over the phone, so that afterward you could say you had done everything (or something) to save your dying marriage. She wondered if she had ever loved Jay—that is, she could no longer remember having loved him, but there was something between them, some intricate bond, that seemed resistant to violations no matter how unforgivable. All she wanted, after all, was to get free of him, and then afterward they could salvage or not whatever dregs of their relationship remained.

  Jay, on the other hand, said he was willing to change if necessary to save their marriage.

  “No one changes after forty-five,” she said.

  “Who said?” he said.

  “I can’t remember anyone who has,” she said, dipping her toe briefly into the well of memory. “Can you?”

  “Maybe what we’re talking about is not the incapacity to change,” he said, “but a failure of memory.”

  She hated it, totally despised it, when he pretended to be smart. At the same time or perhaps a moment afterward she had a quiver of recollection—a subliminal flash—of having felt something other than indifference for him.

  For their first session, they sat in parallel chairs about twenty feet apart facing the therapist, who was in an impressive high-backed armchair in a slightly elevated part of the room.

  “Is there some agreement as to who goes first?” Leo asked, looking at neither of them in such a way as to give each the impression of being the one he was urging.

  Jay was the first to speak. “I don’t mind if she starts,” he said.

  “I’d prefer going second,” she said. “He’s the one who believes in talk.”

  “In that case,” Leo said, “that’s the way we’ll do it. So Jay, what’s your view of why your marriage isn’t working?”

  “Why does she get to go second?” Jay said. “Is it because she’s a woman?”

  “I thought you were both in agreement as to the order here,” Leo said. “When you offered her the opportunity to go first, I assumed you took it to be the favored position. If it wasn’t, why did you make it sound as if you were doing her a favor?”

  “Because that’s the way he is,” she said.

  Leo gestured for her to stop whatever else she was planning to add. “Let’s hear what Jay has to say, shall we?”

  Jay stood up, collected his coat, but then seemed to change his mind from whatever to whatever. “You’re both right,” he said. “I’m a terrible person and I’m choked with regret.”

  “That’s a bit easy,” Leo said. “Don’t you think?”

  “I’m sorry about that too,” he said. “I tend to let myself off too easily and I’m sorry. Okay?”

  “He isn’t really sorry,” Lois said.

  “You’re probably right about that,” he said, “but look, I’m really sorry that I’m not really sorry. What about you, LL? Is there anything you’re sorry about?”

  “That’s not a real question,” she said, “and you know it. Do you want me to say that I’m sorry I married you? All right, I’ll say that I’m sorry I married you.”

  Leo looked around as if there were another person in the room with them, possibly dangerous, that he hadn’t seen before. “Let’s stop here,” he said, “and we’ll continue next Wednesday at the same time.”

  Jay, who had been standing, his coat folded over his arm, sat down. “We haven’t even decided who goes first,” he said.

  While Jay wrote the therapist a check for the truncated session, Lois mumbled, “Thank you, Leo,” and made her way out the door.

  There was an antique shop a few doors down and she occupied herself studying the unusual face of an oversized wall clock in the window, figuring Jay would be out in a few minutes and they would travel back on the subway together. She didn’t see him come out, though sensed his approaching presence, feeling a sugar rush of affection for him, arming herself with a slightly ironic rema
rk.

  For his part, Jay noticed his disaffected wife waiting for him and decided to cross the street to avoid her, pretending to the unseen observer that he was in a huge hurry to get somewhere.

  When, on turning her head, she noticed him rushing from her, she wanted to call out that she was not as frightful as he imagined.

  SECOND SESSION

  “If anything’s going to get accomplished, we’re going to need to give these meetings some structure,” Leo said. “Lois, I’m going to ask you to speak for no more than five minutes. At which point, Jay can either respond to what you’ve said or use the allotted five minutes to present his own grievances. On the second go-around, I’d like you each to address what the other has said. Are there any questions before we begin?… If not, let’s get to it. Lois.”

  “It’s easier if I get up,” she said, though she remained seated. “I don’t think I’ll need five minutes to say what I have to say. Actually, I don’t know why I’m here. For a while now, I kind of thought that, despite our persistent problems, it was worth making whatever effort was necessary to continue to get along. I no longer feel that way. That’s all. Well, one other thing: whatever feelings I once had for Jay are gone. It’s like one morning, they put on their coats and scarves and went out the door. I feel my own growth as a person has been inhibited by this marriage. That’s all. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want to be in this marriage. That’s all I have.”

  Leo seemed to be waiting for Lois to continue, but after a few minutes he pointed his finger at Jay, who seemed to be looking the other way. “Jay?”

  Jay stood up. He had something written on a card that he held up in front of him. “I was going to say that I would do whatever I could to keep us together, but that seems foolish now, doesn’t it?” He sat down, resisted putting his head in his hands.

  Leo looked over at Lois, who made a point of avoiding eye contact, and waited for someone, perhaps even himself, to break the silence. “It might be useful,” he said to her, “if you were more specific about what you want and feel you’re not getting from your marriage.”