The Pavilion of Former Wives

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “My mother never drove a Chevrolet,” she said.

  “If it wasn’t a Chevrolet,” he said, “what was the car we drove across the country? It was a blue and white Chevrolet.”

  “That was a different time,” she said. “Anyway, I never went to high school in Seattle.”

  It was possible that the boy he had caught her with in Seattle resembled her high school sweetheart. The phone interrupted this thought and he took the occasion to answer it. It was someone from their bank, offering to sell him some pointless new service no one in his right mind could possibly want. It was presented to him as a favor they owed him for being such a good customer. Even after he said no thank you, the voice at the other end continued her rehearsed spiel. “Damn it,” he said. “When I say no, I mean no.”

  “When you say no, you often change your mind afterward,” she said. This was Genevieve, not the woman on the phone, whom he had temporarily shut out of his life five minutes earlier.

  When he took Magoo, their Airedale, out for his evening walk, he tried to conjure up Genevieve’s mother’s errant Chevrolet. No details answered his quest. Maybe it wasn’t a Chevrolet, though unless he had lost his mind altogether there had been a car they had picked up in Annapolis and driven to Seattle.

  The next time Josh approached her to make some debater’s point, she could no longer remember the particulars of their long-running argument. He caught her at the refrigerator door, struggling against residual vagueness, wondering what urgency had brought her there. “Are you ready to admit that I was right?” she said.

  “I didn’t want to make the trip to Seattle,” he said, “because I never enjoyed myself in your mother’s house.”

  She peered into the refrigerator, hoping that something in the picture would remind her that she had come on its errand.

  “My mother always spoke highly of you,” she said. “That was until she stopped remembering who you were. She actually encouraged me to marry you, though of course I never did what she wanted and she knew that like the back of her hand.”

  “It was your mother,” he said, “who invited that guy—your high school sweetheart—to lunch with us. He was in Seattle on some business trip or he had just moved there and he phoned your mother to find out where you were.”

  She took a container of milk from the refrigerator, which seemed as good a choice as any. It might have been that she was planning to make a pot of coffee. “You’re saying he, whoever, called my mother.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and she invited him over.”

  “She invited him to the house in Seattle? That’s an odd thing for her to do. Where was I?”

  “You were there,” he said angrily. “You were already there.”

  “Was I? And where were you?”

  “On the outside, looking in.”

  It had been dark for almost two hours and they were still driving around looking for an acceptable place to stop for the night. Genevieve was in one of her moods. None of the motels they passed in the seemingly endless sprawl of this one-street small town impeding their progress appealed to her. “You make the choice, Josh,” she said.

  “What about this one?” he said. They were approaching a row of nondescript cabins. According to the flickering sign, the place was called Dew Drop Inn.

  “Oh, Josh,” she said, “that’s so depressing. We’ve passed by places that were nicer than this.” He pulled into the parking space next to the office. “I’m not staying here,” she muttered.

  He went into the brightly lit office without her and rented 6A with his American Express card, though the proprietor warned that a drunk trucker tended to come by around 3 a.m. and was likely to knock on the door, insisting the place was his. “All you have to do,” the woman said, “is to keep your door locked and pay no attention to him. After a while, he gets discouraged. You’ll be making a big mistake if you answer the door.”

  When he returned to the car, already regretting his decision to pay for the room, Genevieve was a notable absence. He lounged in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, dozing, waiting with willed indifference for her return, assuming nothing, assuming she had gone off looking for a bathroom or had decided to leave him forever. When he could no longer sit still, he evacuated the car to look for her. Having no idea where to look, he headed toward the diner they had passed a block or so back, his best guess, hurrying, speed-walking, breathing hard, running.

  He was so intent on getting there he nearly ran over her in the dark, as she came slowly toward him. “Is that you, Josh?” she said. “I got us some coffee.”

  “Damn you,” he said.

  She woke up the next morning with something on her mind that concerned Joshua. She woke up remembering how fond she was of him, which was, she suspected, an abrupt change in the weather. For months, perhaps years, she had been nursing the hope that he would silently disappear. As soon as she got into her forest-green terrycloth bathrobe, which he had given her last Christmas (there were some things she didn’t forget), she intended to go downstairs—she heard someone banging around in the kitchen—and tell whomever it was (who else could it be?) about her discovery. A detour to the bathroom to pee and to brush her teeth interceded. By the time Genevieve reached the kitchen, she could still remember she had something she wanted to tell Joshua, but not what it was.

  “I made coffee,” he said when she approached, “but I finished most of it.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.

  He took a coffee mug from the cupboard for her, filling it almost halfway with what remained of the pot he had brewed. He was embarrassed to tell her that there was no longer any milk.

  She improvised her news. “I need to know,” she said, “why you leave fingerprints on the bathroom towels.”

  “So we’ll have a subject for conversation,” he said, “other than Seattle, which you won’t discuss.”

  “Do you expect the fingerprints to go on forever?” she asked.

  “Not forever,” he said. “If he wasn’t your high school sweetheart, who was the man in the bedroom with you in Seattle?”

  She left the room abruptly, having no interest in the turn the conversation had taken, but then returned momentarily with an appropriate response. “Whoever he was, he didn’t leave fingerprints on clean towels,” she said.

  “If he was such a paragon, why didn’t you run off with him when you had the chance?”

  She was on to him now. “You brought him around, didn’t you, so you would have an excuse to get rid of me. That’s so like you.”

  “It was your mother, not me, who brought him into the house.”

  “So you say,” she said, “but it could have been you who told Mother to invite him over. This happened where?”

  “It was in Seattle.”

  “No way.”

  “I know it was Seattle. That was where your mother was living at the time.”

  “I’ll tell you why you’re wrong,” she said. “My mother never would have allowed it, never in a million years. You know what I think? I think the person in the bedroom with me was you.”

  He left an unfinished sentence on his computer screen to ask Genevieve if she would like to go for a walk.

  “Do I like taking walks?” she asked.

  He couldn’t remember the last time they had walked together, but he wouldn’t have asked if there was no chance that she would accept. Rejection had never been high on his list of priorities. “It’s your call,” he said.

  “My call?” she said. “Really my call? I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk with you if you promise not to tell me your dream. Let’s not walk too far, all right?” She took his arm, then gave it back and disappeared to find her coat. Her searches always took longer than anticipated. She remembered that she hated to feel cold while whoever she was with seemed not to mind.

  When she returned, she asked him if he knew why she had her coat on.

  “We were going to go for a walk if I made a certain promise,” he
said.

  “Did you really think I didn’t know we were going for a walk?” she said. “I knew we were going for a walk. What was this promise you were going to make?”

  “I’m not making any promises,” he said.

  “You make too many promises as it is,” she said, which offended him momentarily and then amused him to no end. It seemed to him the wittiest thing she had said to him in ages.

  His extended amusement, which bent him over, disconcerted her. She wondered if she had meant what she said, whatever it was, as a joke all along. She laughed in echo, not wanting to seem out of it.

  He was still smiling at her remark as they started their walk hand in hand in the general direction of their local park.

  “How much farther do we have to go?” she asked.

  “We haven’t gone anywhere, sweetheart,” he said. “Do you want to go back? We’ll go back if you want to go back.”

  “I don’t want to do anything that makes you angry,” she said, “though everything I do makes you angry.”

  “Let’s go back,” he said, taking back his hand.

  “I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Do you even know the way back? You’re always getting us lost. You know that’s true.”

  “Of course I know the way,” he said, looking over his shoulder to see if their house was still in the distance behind them. “And when did I ever get you lost?”

  A much younger couple with a baby in a stroller excused themselves to edge their way by. “Do you know where the park is?” Genevieve asked the woman.

  “It’s where we’re going,” the woman said. “You can follow us.”

  Genevieve admired the baby and thanked the couple.

  “I know where the park is,” Josh said when they were alone. “You didn’t have to ask anyone.”

  After a while they came to the corner of their extended block and Josh saw or thought he saw the park in the distance, the couple with the stroller framed in the entrance, which confirmed him in his view of himself as someone in charge of his own life. He had a reputation even in better days for having an unreliable sense of direction. It was strictly the judgment of others. Insofar as he could remember, he had always gotten where he was going.

  “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Genevieve asked.

  “We’re just taking a walk,” he said.

  “I suppose that’s all right,” she said.

  Eventually, the park moved toward them in its leisurely pace. It was late afternoon and the trees seemed backlit, suffused with light. “Do I like the park?” she asked.

  He didn’t want to lie to her, though God knew there had been lies between them before. “Almost everyone likes the park,” he said.

  “I was here as a child,” she said. “Do you remember? The park was larger then.”

  He was thinking it was time to turn back, but he let the thought, with its disquieting urgencies, dissolve. They were getting along so well, he didn’t want to disturb the rhythm that had brought them to this place.

  They took the center path, but after a while it seemed more rewarding to take a right turn on a narrower, more cunning road, dotted at uncertain intervals with stone benches.

  “Is this my warmest coat?” she asked him.

  He took his coat off and put it around her shoulders. “Would you like to sit for a while?”

  “If you do,” she said. “I always ruin things for you.”

  “Isn’t that the nature of marriage,” he said.

  They were between benches and he chose for their resting place the one they had already passed, shortening if not by much the distance necessary for return. As her bottom made acquaintance with the bench, she gave up a sigh, leaning into Josh to exclude the darkness. “I know what you’re saying,” she said. “You think I’m like my mother. It so happens I remember that we met in a park very much like this one. I was with another boy at the time, someone from my class…”

  He continued to worry that they would not find their way back in the dark, but her story, which he had never heard before, fascinated him. He was desperate to hear how it turned out and he would sit there with her, he decided, shoulder to shoulder, as the temperature fell and the shadowy light went its vagrant way, to the bitter end.

  THE STORY

  He didn’t know if he had read the story somewhere, in a magazine or book perhaps, or someone he didn’t know very well, perhaps hardly knew at all, had told it to him at a party in an unguarded moment, or he had invented it himself some time ago and didn’t know how to close it out so he had filed it away in his mind as something he might deal with in the future, when he had enough distance from it to contend with the material, or—the least likely of his alternatives— something like it had actually happened to him and, troubled by its implicit commentary, he had blocked it out and now, for its own reasons, it had returned to insist on itself, on its prerogative as narrative, its bloody need, its inalienable right, to have a life of its own separate from his uncertain connection to it, and what was he going to do about it, what could he do as a writer but honor its insistent presence by retelling the story in a way that would emphasize its uniqueness as an imaginative event while at the same time hoping that no one else after the fact would show up to make claim to it, which would mean that the story, for all its closeness to his heart—meaning his artistic vision—had never really been his in the first place and therefore what he had done with it would be vitiated by the charge of plagiarism laid at his door, rightful or not, and worse, make him regret his commitment to the story and even regret the story itself, which would be like falling out of love when he had announced to everyone that this one was forever, but then again no one, no one that counted, might show up to deny his right to the story when he had already made it his own, covering the traces of its origins in any event—but hadn’t all stories, in a certain sense, been told before, which was the word on the media street, a popular conception or misconception and so irrelevant to his concerns at the moment (and damn it, where did the story come from anyway) which were (are) to produce a memorable version of the story, the best possible version given his gifts and limitations, whatever they may be, which is the business of others, critics and such, educated readers, to determine, his arrant immodesty best kept to himself far from the public eye or whatever goodwill his work has accrued over the years will leak through the holes in his reputation, which is a small thing as it is, with unspoken aspirations toward bettering its condition, and what did he really know what the general culture thought of his work if at all, did he even want to know…but let’s get back to the story, he tells himself, it’s the story that matters, he is only its executor, or caretaker perhaps, or parent, the one who keeps it clothed and fed until it is sufficiently formed to deal with the world without him around to mediate its existence, the story which concerns a writer not much like himself who has come into unspecified possession of a story of at once general interest and self-defining strangeness that seems to insist, virtually demand, that whoever takes it up give it voice, but as it has been entrusted to him, this extraordinary event, by whatever gods control the destinies of prose narrative (by chance, he supposed, and vision and luck), he feels burdened by such responsibility, perhaps even thwarted by it so it requires of him an act of will or presumption to give the story in question the kind of imaginative recreation it surely deserves and so the shadow of possible failure, possibly inevitable failure looms over his endeavor even as he feels he is solving whatever inherent mystery lies at its core, he is also falling short of the perfect accommodation of substance to form but no one will know while it remains in a state of ongoing inconclusion (in life, all stories go on indefinitely or slip away into ellipsis), so this sentence, which is the story, which embodies the story, cannot be allowed to, has to be held in abeyance as it acknowledges an implicit mortality wholly alien to the nature of perfection, achieve even the illusion of closure without permanently curtailing whatever hope for the earned unexpected it brings to the
page, it cannot be brought to conclusion, it cannot be, it cannot, it…

  TRAVELS WITH WIZARD

  After turning sixty amid a debilitating winter that had hung on long beyond expectation, after his latest live-in girlfriend had elected to move on, after renewed feelings of hopelessness had moved in to replace her, the biographer Leo Dimoff, sensing the need for radical change in his life, decided to get a dog.

  Why a dog?

  For one thing, living alone after a lifelong failed apprenticeship in the relationship trade, Leo felt deprived, wanted companionship though without the attendant complications. All the women in his life, or so he understood his history of failures, had burdened him with unanswerable demands.

  “You want a dog because they don’t talk back,” Sarah, his most recent former live-in companion, told him over dinner at the very Japanese restaurant that had hosted their breakup. They had lived together for almost a year in the not-so-distant, unremembered past and had remained contentious friends

  “Dog owners are never called chauvinists,” he said. “And certainly not by their dogs.”

  “I love dogs,” she said, “though I’ve never had one. What kind of dog are you thinking of, Leo?”

  “I’ve been doing the research,” he said. “I may have read everything about choosing the right dog the written word had in stock. I may in fact have acquired more information than I know what to do with. What I’m in the market for is a medium-sized, aesthetically pleasing, low-maintenance puppy who is affectionate, intelligent, and, most importantly, faithful. I’d be grateful for suggestions.”

  “Whew!” she said, turning her face away to issue a brief, secretive smile. “Well, I know it’s not for everyone, but I’ve always been partial to the Russell Terrier.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a kind of circus dog, isn’t it? One of my dog texts—it may be Puppies for Dummies—says that Russells tend to be high-strung.”