The Pavilion of Former Wives

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “There’s someone here,” B says in a choked voice. The intruder raises his head, looks directly at B—their faces are no more than six inches apart—but seems not to see him. The man is asleep and snoring softly before B can protest again. He imagines himself climbing out of bed and reclaiming his shoes, a gesture he repeats over and over again, waking hours later from this dream to find a heavy arm sprawled possessively across his chest.

  B slips off the bed, searches the floor for his shoes, escapes the room on his hands and knees. Y is in the hall, standing with her back to him, smoking a cigarette.

  “You missed a great party,” she says when he touches her shoulder. When she turns he notices an ugly purple bruise under her right eye.

  “What happened?” he asks her.

  “Nothing,” she says, averting her eyes. “Nothing worth talking about.” She takes a pair of sunglasses from her purse and puts them on. “Did they give you a room?” he asks.

  “Better than that,” she says. “I have the keys to a station wagon parked outside that we can take to the station. The thing is, I can’t leave with you…and don’t say what I think you’re going to say.”

  “I’ll wait until you’re ready to leave,” he says.

  “Look, it’s a long story,” Y says, “but I promised to stay with the assistant professor, just until he gets on his feet. His wife and children left him nine days ago and he’s in a bad state, suicidal, needy and potentially violent.”

  The news troubles B but he says nothing more about it, waits his occasion.

  In the car, in the passenger seat, just as Y is about to start the engine, he has an urge to put his head in her lap, which is what he does. They kiss twice before moving to the back of the station wagon. “You never said anything,” she says.

  It is morning, the back door of the wagon is opened. The sudden light disturbs their sleep, discovers them in disarray, B’s pants bunched at the ankles, Y’s bra perched on a stack of American Scholar magazines like a huddled bird. A small crowd of onlookers makes its presence felt.

  After that, the despondent assistant professor, full of mock bravado, traces of tears glazing his glasses, drives them to the station.

  “I can’t leave him like this,” Y says to B when they park.

  Leave him, B wants to say, but instead leaves the arena of the car himself. “I’ll wait for you inside the station,” he says to Y. She nods to him in uncommitted acknowledgment.

  He discovers his overnight case sitting in the waiting room and he picks it up and puts it on his lap, reclaims his former life.

  According to the schedule in his jacket pocket the next train for New York City comes and goes in nine minutes. The one after that is three hours and twenty minutes down the road.

  Five minutes pass and Y is still in the station wagon, locked in conversation with the aggrieved assistant professor. B worries that Y won’t get back in time to make the train. When he looks over his shoulder to see if Y is on her way, the brown and green wagon is no longer on vigil outside. B rushes out to look for Y just as he hears the train huffing carelessly toward the station. Y’s undeniable absence echoes through the parking lot. He has lost her again. It is always the case with him: every loss seems the same loss, the first loss, the only loss.

  B rushes back to board the train, unaware in his haste that the train he boards is actually coming from where he means to go.

  B is dozing at a window seat, unaware that he is heading toward Ohio and points west, when someone slides lightly into the seat next to him. Her perfume is familiar; so is the feel of her arm on his shoulder. “You left without me,” she whispers, “after all your promises. That’s hard to forgive.” She presents him with a ghostly peck on the cheek, the bare touch of her lips.

  The opening phrase of a poem forms itself in his mind.

  I sensed the sky closing like the door of an abandoned…

  He acknowledges her reproach with a nod and closes his eyes to the unfamiliar countryside at the window—a field of motionless brown and white cows with a ramshackle red barn in the distance, a landscape absent from his history until this moment—now edging irreversibly away into the past.

  Will she be there, he wonders, when in the course of things he finds the will or the courage or whatever it takes to look back?

  SHAPESHIFTING

  We had always considered Joel crazy, but not, if you will, crazy crazy. There is a difference. For Joel, who had exhibitionist impulses, craziness was a form of self-presentation. He was a character in search of an audience, a shy provocateur with an over-the-top, uncensored imagination. If it was his way to see conspiracy in virtually every public event; there was something in his manner, a sly, self-amused half-smile, that suggested a barely hidden ironic subtext. As it suited me to believe, Joel knew, or some part of him knew, that his outrageous scenarios had only metaphoric counterpart in the real world. Match that with the evidence of his private life. Married with two grown daughters (never divorced, like most of the rest of us), a successful ad company exec, he seemed, on balance, at least as together as most.

  As Joel got older, however, the line between performer and performance became harder to distinguish. And then just recently, his wife, Dotty, confided to Helena, my live-in girlfriend, that Joel was behaving oddly, which worried her. What I said when she passed on Dotty’s remark to me was, “How could she tell?” I was kidding, of course, but all jokes have their own hidden truths.

  It all started, or seemed to, about a year or so after the Kennedy assassination. At a dinner party at the home of mutual friends, in which fewer than half of those present thought Oswald the lone assassin, Joel offered an elaborate scenario for the Kennedy shooting, which included a network of secret doubles, two Rubys, two Oswalds, and—I’ve heard this nowhere else—two Kennedys.

  “Two Kennedys, huh? What about two Johnsons?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered with deadpan solemnity and perfect comic timing, “one Johnson was more than enough.”

  And then there was the election year when he announced that the two major parties were in collusion and had decided between them in secret meetings who would be the winner this time around. It was either his reason for not voting—I forget now—or for supporting a third-party candidate who was destined to end up with no electoral votes. I was not alone in pointing out to him the high level of hostility between the two parties, the unforgivable things spokesmen of one party said about candidates of the other. How did that jibe with his theory? He would wink and say, “Well, they have to make it look good, don’t they?” And then he would offer us a drink (or not) and talk about something else, something closer to home. He rarely elaborated on his theories, presuming, or so his manner suggested, that his perceptions were self-evident to anyone who had his wits about him.

  To tell the truth, some of his pronouncements had for fleeting moments crossed my mind as well, only to be dispelled by rational second thoughts.

  “So what is it this time?” I pressed Helena, who had been grudging about passing on the details of Dotty’s confidence. Helena and Dotty had been roommates at Wellesley and were exceedingly, sometimes vexingly, close. Still, it was Dotty I had to thank for Helena— she and Joel had, rather cunningly I have to say, arranged for us to meet.

  “He accused Dotty of being an imposter,” she said. “Stuff like that.”

  “He was speaking metaphorically, I assume.”

  “Dotty doesn’t think so. He told her that he found her imposture—that was the word he used, imposture—sympathetic, even liked her at times better than the original, whom he nevertheless missed. That’s terrible. Don’t you think that’s terrible?”

  I nodded dutifully, more amused than horrified, but I continued to believe, or wanted to believe, that Joel was not exactly saying what he seemed to be saying. “So what did she say in response?”

  “What would anyone say? After she cried for a couple of hours, she asked him to get help or to move out. He said he’d rather give up
his home than put himself in the hands of some overpriced fraud.”

  “She asked him to move out?” I had trouble connecting the dots.

  “What did I just say?”

  “They’ve been together for close to—what?—thirty-five years. She knows what he’s like. This can’t have been as big a surprise to her as she’s making out.”

  “Excuse me,” Helena said. “Conjecturing a John F. Kennedy double is very different from telling the person you’ve lived with for thirty-three years that she’s an imposter.”

  “I take your point,” I said. Unlike Joel, my usual mode was not to provoke disputes, but on the contrary I was known—it was my self-presentation—to go out of my way to keep the peace. “He didn’t actually move out, did he?”

  “No,” she conceded, “though nothing has been resolved. As a matter of fact, Dotty wondered if you would be willing to talk to Joel.”

  “Do I have to?” I said. “About what? You really want me to ask him if he thinks Dotty is not herself? Joel and I have never discussed our private lives.”

  “I told her you would do it,” she said.

  2

  Though neither of us were drinkers, at least not anymore, we met at a downtown bar for our talk—I was hoping Joel would find a way to say no when I suggested it, but he accepted as soon as the invitation was in the air. It was almost as if he had been anticipating the request. He arrived late, late enough for me to think he wasn’t coming, and seemed at least at the outset uncharacteristically subdued.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Joel said after we had ordered our second beers and the small talk had shrunk to the point of near invisibility.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I thought you might.”

  And then for close to an hour, with a few momentary stops for breath, he talked non-stop, his subject transforming almost with every sentence, telling me more than I wanted to hear—it was like being trapped inside a buzz saw—and not a lot that I wanted to know.

  I’d like to cut away from this scene for the moment to one that followed after I returned home and gave Helena a generalized report of our inconclusive meeting.

  “He must have said more than that,” she said. “You were with him for hours.”

  “It was as if he were talking in tongues,” I said. “Some of it made a kind of sense, but there was not much connective thread.”

  “Does he really believe Dotty is an imposter?”

  “I don’t think the subject came up. It may have, but it went by so quickly, I can’t remember the implication.”

  “Sometimes you have to ask these things,” she said. “You didn’t find out anything, did you? Nothing. Nada. Zip.”

  “If that’s what you want to believe,” I said.

  “I have to tell Dotty something. I bragged that you were good at getting information from people who didn’t naturally confide. But you struck out this time, didn’t you? What am I going to tell Dotty?”

  “You could tell her that I struck out.”

  She left the room, which was the kitchen, but returned momentarily. “Why do I feel that there’s something you’re not telling me? It feels to me that it’s the guys against the women, which is not like you. I wish you would tell me that I’ve gotten it wrong.”

  “What I’m going to tell you now, Josh,” he said, “I’m sure you already know, though perhaps you haven’t formulated it for yourself quite the way I have. We all suspected when the movie, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, appeared that there were aspects of its story that seemed closer to prescience than fantasy. Isn’t that so?” I nodded when he paused for an answer. “Well, maybe fifteen years ago, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty, maybe even longer than that, an advance party of what I call shape-shifting extraterrestrials took residence in the United States. They were here whenever it was they arrived mainly for observation and study and they kept a relatively low profile. Only rarely, perhaps out of boredom or whatever, did they intrude on our everyday lives. Gradually, and I have some theories as to why which are probably obvious to you, their mission became more aggressive. As shapeshifters, they had the capacity to replicate any living form and they decided, or their high command decided, to probe our civilization. Who knew what their intention was beyond mischief or malice or some kind of godlike vengeance. We’re talking about a civilization so advanced that its way of perceiving was probably beyond our power even to imagine. You may remember that after the World Trade Center tragedy, I said it was likely that there was more to that than meets the eye.” I did remember and I reluctantly said, “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s clear to me now that there were no suicide bombers as such. Or that at least half of the hijacking crew (as well as their organizers) were shape-shifting extraterrestrials, and when the planes exploded they didn’t die, at least not in the sense that we understand death, but merely lost their human shapes or exchanged them for new ones. At the same time, these outsiders, these uninvited visitors as I call them, had infiltrated our government at its highest echelon. I can’t say for sure who is and who isn’t at this juncture, though I have my suspicions and, as we’ve seen, they initiated actions designed to undermine the prestige and power of what had been the most prestigious and powerful nation in our world. The seemingly pointless war in Iraq, to be understood, has to be seen as a hideous extraterrestrial amusement. They’re fucking with us, buddy. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “I don’t know, Joel,” I said in a small voice, cowed by his certainty. “There are also other explanations.”

  “Okay. Okay,” he said impatiently. “There is always some half-credible official explanation for whatever. Believe what you like if it gives you comfort. But you can see from the people around you, can’t you, that the shapeshifters have taken over more than just the leading players on the big stage. As with all public disasters, this one has its private ramifications.”

  There seemed no point in arguing with him. “All right,” I said. “Say I accept your explanations, what’s next? What can I do that would help the situation?”

  “I’ve given that a lot of thought,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do, Josh, nothing that would alter things, beyond helping those in the dark see the situation for what it is. I’ve told you what I know at great personal risk in the hope that you’ll pass it on to others. It’s a start, an inescapable necessity, to have an awareness of what you’re up against. You see that, don’t you? I’m trying to be hopeful, I really am, but my gut feeling tells me there is no hope. Or very, very little. Our only hope, as I reckon it, and that’s a huge stretch, is that the shapeshifters will get bored with their manipulations and go away.” He looked as if he were doing all he could not to cry.

  “That’s not much of a hope, is it?”

  He did a double take as if there were something about me he hadn’t noticed before. “That’s what any of you would say,” he said.

  When you’re talking to someone with absolute belief—and in this case there was no half-amused, sly smile to undermine his conviction—it shakes your own sense of reality, which is what I said to Helena.

  “Joel’s always been full of shit,” she said. “You take him too seriously. You guys always have.”

  And that’s when I got in trouble with Helena, not so much for defending Joel as for defending the way I wanted to perceive him. And while we argued, bad feelings turning to worse, I had the bizarre sense that this was not the Helena I had been living with in affectionate companionship for fourteen years—our fifteenth anniversary was just three months away—but a barely convincing imposter.

  3

  Events move too quickly here to track them with the kind of cause-and-effect detail that particularizes them for the reader. About two months (perhaps three) after our “talk” at the Brass Bar, Joel was institutionalized for depression. My source for this information was Helena, who was in daily telephone contact with Dotty and whose conversations I sometimes eavesdropped on from my study with the door ajar, missing the equi
valent of every third word. So I knew Dotty’s representation of events, or as much of it as Helena was willing to share, but almost nothing of Joel’s side. I did reach him once on the phone after several failed tries (the story was he went two weeks without a word to anyone), and was subjected to a brief rant before he hung up or the phone was taken from him. A few lines from what I think of now as a cry for help have stayed with me.

  “They know I’m onto them,” he said. “One of these days, you can set your watch on it, they’re going to put me out of commission. They’re going to…. I can’t say any more. Shhh. Someone’s coming. When it happens, you’ll know.” Other times when I tried to reach him, I was told he didn’t want to come to the phone. Once by Dotty, once by the older daughter, who was staying over after the breakup of her marriage.

  Joel’s ostensible depression has created an ever-widening invisible rift between Helena and me. I say invisible because in public, for the most part, we are our old selves together. In private, uncharacteristically, she shows almost no compassion for Joel’s condition. One day, after one of her extended conversations with Dotty, she told me, “She’s finally beginning to be able to admit to herself that she’s happier without him.”

  “Is that a positive?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be? I don’t understand what you’re asking. We want Dotty to feel better about her life, don’t we?”

  “What about Joel?”

  “This has nothing to do with Joel. Joel is of no use to Dotty in his present state. Joel is lost, and maybe always has been. He doesn’t live in the same world as the rest of us.”

  This is where our conversation would break off and I would think, wanting to see Helena in the best possible light, that maybe she doesn’t mean these remarks as harshly as they sound to me.