The Pavilion of Former Wives

by Jonathan Baumbach

  By this time, I have chased after my parked car on four different streets, each with its own persuasive claim in fickle memory and, need I even say it, without success. In the past, when I’ve been unable to find my car after giving more than sufficient time to the search, I saw no point in beating myself up over it. So I conceded the loss and got home by other means. Perhaps the car had been stolen—what other explanation could there be, I had pretty much covered the area looking for it—and so, as I depended on a car, I considered buying a new one, or perhaps a previously owned one in near-new condition, though a native caution restrained me from rushing into something I might later regret. At the same time, I saw no point in sacrificing my life to a seemingly endless search for an unrecoverable object, no matter my affection for it. I’ve been in this situation, I admit with some reluctance, more than once, and I have avoided excessive despair in each case. Sanity, as I see it, is knowing when to throw away false hope. In my weaker moments, I concede that the world is haunted.

  The above was what Joshua told Clarissa, his dinner companion, a woman he had met through a matchmaking service on the Internet in which applicants filled out a detailed personality profile. Clarissa had asked him for a revealing anecdote about himself and he took the risk of telling her about his disappeared car. They had made a point of sharing embarrassing stories as a way of getting to know the other while easing the awkwardness of what was, after all, a blind date. His counselor from the MatchesMadeInHeaven.com service had told him unofficially that Clarissa’s personality profile indicated an unusual capacity for empathy, and so Josh was cautiously hopeful of being understood without being judged.

  A woman with an interestingly ruined face, Clarissa was, in her own words, a former litigations lawyer who, having risen from the ashes of a midlife crisis, had reinvented herself as a psychotherapist. Josh, on the other hand, had attended medical school without completing the course, had published two books of poems and a mystery novel (under a pseudonym), had taught, at different times in his life, history, Renaissance poetry, and filmmaking, and was currently the book review editor of a small, highly respected journal of opinion with extremely limited financial resources. Since his divorce six months ago, he tended to eat most of his meals out, though at less upscale places than the one Clarissa had chosen for their first date.

  He couldn’t exactly say why, but there was something about Clarissa that spoke to his deepest urges. Moments after she sat down across from him, he fantasized undressing her in slow motion, pressing his face into her slightly protruding belly, sliding his tongue down the incline into the sweet space between her legs. It was not a usual urge, and he wondered if this was what it was like to connect with one’s soulmate.

  “I don’t think we’re all that much alike,” she said to him at one point, “and I mean that, I really do, as a positive.”

  Her assertion soured his mood. “How so?”

  “Well,” she said, “for one, if I misplaced something that I valued, I wouldn’t give up looking for it until I recovered it.”

  “I used to be that way,” he said, “but I’ve learned to be less absolute.”

  “I wasn’t being critical of you,” she said. “Did you think I was?”

  This was when the waiter appeared to take their orders and Josh discovered that Clarissa had ordered the very entree he had in mind for himself, which put him in a temporary bind. To assert that he was his own person, he ordered instead something he had no intention of ordering, something he had always wanted to try but had managed up until now to avoid, a spur-of-the-moment improvisatory maneuver.

  “I don’t know what to make of your choice,” she said. “I was told that your profile indicated we have similar tastes in food and that, like me, what you put in your mouth is important to you. Herman and I—Herman was my second husband—always used to order the same entrees in restaurants; that is, until I discovered I was accommodating myself to his tastes, which were not mine at all.”

  Often without warning—it was an aspect of the haunted thing—attraction would turn into repulsion for him and back again like changes in the weather. “Look,” he said, “I need to get this off my chest so there’ll be no misunderstanding down the road. I’m not really looking for a long-term relationship.” Listening to himself, he deplored his crudeness, but at the same time he was pleased, as it seemed to him, to clear the air.

  “Good,” she said. “It’s a relief to have that out of the way.” She held out her hand for him to shake, which he took with gratitude after a moment’s hesitation followed by internal crosswinds of wonder and trepidation. Whatever he had agreed to, it was an agreement whose terms remained elusive.

  When the waiter delivered dessert menus, Clarissa turned them away with a wave of her hand. “We can do better than this at my place,” she said. “I have two-thirds of a very good pear cobbler and some excellent French roast decaf. How does that sound?”

  “Isn’t it getting late?” he said, looking at his watch for confirmation after the question.

  She gave him a sympathetic smile punctuated by a charming, perhaps even seductive shrug. “It’s not late for me,” she said. “I’m a night person.”

  A huge raucous laugh went up at the table behind them, a chorus of near-hysterical discordant amusement. At first it seemed to be a table of eight women, but then he noticed that one of them, the one apparently amusing the others, was a man with a ponytail.

  When the check arrived, Clarissa covered it with her hand and edged it over to her side of the table. “This is mine,” she said.

  “Why don’t we just split it,” he said, but by the time he extracted his credit card from his wallet, she had already handed the bill, trumped with her own plastic, to a passing waiter. He felt defeated and somewhat embittered. “I’ll get the next one,” he said.

  “I’ll hold you to it,” she said.

  More shrill laughter from the table behind them, one of the women falling out of her chair with a thump and an ear-shattering squeal, to applause from the others.

  On the way out of the restaurant, the oldest-looking of the women at the noisy table winked at him as he passed.

  The advertised pear cobbler had a suspicion of mold at the edges and Clarissa, sighing her apology, scraped both plates into the garbage with an unnerving decisiveness.

  “It’s all right,” Josh said, more disturbed by Clarissa’s abruptness than the loss of dessert. It felt to him somehow as if he had been the one discarded.

  “Why don’t we go to bed for dessert,” she said, “and after that, if something else is required, I’ll make us a pot of coffee.”

  “Clarissa, if it’s all right with you, I’d prefer having my coffee before dessert,” he said, postponing what he wanted (or didn’t) most.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I totally knew you were going to say that, I could have spoken your lines for you.”

  “Really?” he said. “And what am I going to say now?”

  “You were going to ask the very question you just asked,” she said, laughing.

  He considered his options as if he had several, wanting to reclaim his uniqueness by doing something she would never have anticipated.

  So striving for the unexpected, he opted for sex before coffee and afterward rejected the coffee option and went home before she was ready to part with him.

  The next morning he thought of phoning Clarissa, but kept finding reasons to postpone what hardwired instinct told him was a necessary gesture.

  And so when the phone rang late in the afternoon, he had no doubts who was on the line. “Have you been thinking of calling me?” were her first words.

  He would never again, he told himself, get involved with a woman with a similar personality profile. “As usual, you’re on to me,” he said.

  “And so why didn’t you?”

  “Why didn’t I what?”

  “Why didn’t you call when you were thinking about it?”

  He assumed it was a rhetorical question sinc
e, as the evidence suggested, she knew him better than he knew himself. After worrying the question, he made the only answer their dialogue allowed. “I didn’t call,” he said, “so as not to deny you the opportunity to call first and ask if I’d been thinking of calling you.”

  His remark, which he meant to be charming, produced a jagged hole in the conversation. “If you say so,” she said after the silence had extended itself into the anxiety of unknown territory.

  He was about to say he was glad that he hadn’t lost her when she said, “Pigeon shit,” and hung up. She was gone before he could register his surprise at what seemed a wholly uncharacteristic response.

  A former wife, a former former wife, used to hang up on him when he said something she didn’t want to hear (or anticipated not wanting to hear what he hadn’t yet said), and the recollection doubled his anger at Clarissa. If he called back, which was his first impulse (already replaced), he would tell her how much he hated to be hung up on. In the end, he decided against calling her until, if ever, he was in a position to forgive her dismissal of him.

  He imagined Clarissa thinking she never wanted to hear from him again and he was strangely comforted by the realization that, on such short acquaintance, they had already achieved a near-unbreachable rift in their undefined relationship.

  The next day he called MatchesMadeInHeaven.com and told his counselor that he didn’t think it was going to work out with Clarissa. What other matches were there with his name on them? “I’ll re-evaluate your profile,” the counselor said, “and get back to you.”

  Clarissa called later in the week to tell him of a dream she had concerning him. “In this dream,” she said, “we were leaving a movie together—it was a Japanese horror film, in which characters transformed according to certain inner qualities—and I suddenly knew— it couldn’t have been more lucid—I knew without a doubt where your lost car was, and I led you to it. The odd thing was that you were displeased at my finding it for you and I was sorry—this was also very clear in the dream—I was sorry that I had gone out of my way to help you.”

  “I see,” he said, not seeing at all.

  “You don’t see,” she said. “Josh, the dream was extremely vivid, and if you’ll take me on as your guide, so to speak, I have the feeling that I can find your lost car for you. There’s one provision you’ll have to agree to first.”

  “Okay,” he said, “what do I have to agree to?”

  “You have to promise in advance that you’ll be pleased to get it back. Can you promise that?”

  “Why did you hang up on me last time we talked?” he asked.

  There were a few beats of silence before she spoke and he wondered if he had inadvertently invited being cut off again.

  “When did I hang up on you?” she asked, her tone aggrieved. “Why would I hang up on you?”

  “Well,” he said, “you hung up on me because apparently you were offended at something I said,” he said.

  “Offended, huh?” she said. “If you knew why I hung up on you, why did you ask me the reason?”

  “I’m willing to let the subject drop,” he said, “whatever the subject.”

  When they arrived at the movie theater to begin their search, Clarissa corroborated that his local nine-plex, grandiosely called the Pavilion, was indeed much like the theater in her dream.

  They walked slowly, hand in hand, checking out each car they passed, and he felt, not for the first time, that there was something uncanny between them. Nevertheless, he found himself hoping that the unlikely, the near impossible, was not going to triumph over what he liked to think of as common sense.

  She pulled him to a stop at a nondescript Honda with Massachusetts plates and he hesitated, not quite looking at the car, before denying that it was his.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  The question outraged him. “Don’t you think I know my own car?”

  “You have to admit,” she said, “the coincidence is impressive, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes…no…who knows,” he said. “Despite the impressive coincidence, I’m fairly sure this is not my car. Clarissa, do you ever have the sense—if this is crazy, tell me—that the world is haunted?”

  Clarissa reluctantly agreed to move on, but after two more blocks in which there had not been another vehicle with Massachusetts plates, she wondered if they might not revisit the Honda Civic he had rejected.

  “That’s not my car,” he said again, which was not exactly denying her request.

  They retraced their steps in no particular hurry, their destination unacknowledged, and found themselves alongside the vehicle in question before either was ready to resume their postponed dispute.

  She put her hands over his eyes, to which he made the smallest of complaints. “What does your lost car look like?” she asked.

  It took him a while to evoke a picture in his mind. When he had conceded the car’s loss, he had all but erased it from memory. “It’s a grayish, tannish color,” he said.

  “What’s the nameplate?” she asked.

  “I don’t pay much attention to those kind of things,” he said. “It’s a Honda something, a Honda Civic, I think, four years old, though it could be a Toyota. No, my previous car was a Toyota.”

  “When last seen, what kind of condition was the car in?”

  “A few scrapes on the back and on the left side, which were not my fault,” he said. “Other than that, and some winter residue, it looked almost immaculate.”

  “Well,” she said, removing her hands from his eyes, “we have here a latish-model grayish-tan Honda Civic with a nasty scrape on the left side, and some scratches here and there on the back.”

  “All cars look pretty much alike these days,” he said.

  “Why don’t you try your key,” she said, “so there will be no residual doubt afterward.”

  He was in no rush to retrieve his key from the depths of his left pocket, but he made a point of walking around the car, going through the motions of noting its disfigurations. “This car has more dings than mine,” he said.

  She laughed. “I won’t say it,” she said, “because I don’t want to have you angry with me again. If I didn’t like you as much as I do, would I be here with you on this bizarre errand?”

  He felt as if he were standing on his toes in quicksand. “What won’t you say,” he said, the words escaping his decision not to ask.

  “I won’t say what I won’t say because you already know what it is. Look, I’m sorry, Josh. Really. I am sorry.”

  He produced the key from his pocket like a magic trick. With grave reluctance, he made a show of trying to open the passenger door and failing.

  She gently took the key from him and opened the door on the driver’s side on first try.

  He turned away. “Must be a universal key,” he muttered.

  “I didn’t hear that,” she said, “but I get the general point. Shall we see if the key is also compatible with the ignition?”

  She was one of those women who acted on the likely response to a question—he had intuited this about her from day one—before the answer was ever spoken. He put his arms around her, held her close to him—people passed in twos and threes, there were occasional cheers, darkness arrived unannounced—to hold off the inevitable for as long as possible.

  “This,” she said, “what you’re doing, I had no idea it was coming. Really, no idea.”

  Years later, after they were living together, after they had done a scripted TV ad together for MatchesMadeInHeaven.com, in which he had acknowledged her as his soulmate, he still hadn’t forgiven her for finding his car. That she knew he continued to resent her gave him a certain advantage in the relationship. For the first several years, before indifference set in, Clarissa did whatever she could to make it up to him for having occasioned his humiliation on their second date. With what she thought were the best intentions, the intentions of love, she had willfully done him a favor she might have known in advance he didn’t want.
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  THE NIGHT WRITER

  What can you say about someone who rewrites his sentences in his dreams? It has probably already been said. And it wasn’t every night that he rewrote sentences in his sleep. Perhaps once a week or once every other week or once every three weeks—sometimes, in fact, two days in a row—whenever the subconscious compulsion took him, overriding discretion.

  It usually happened on the road, when he was sleeping in strange beds, and came about more often than not when he hadn’t had sex in a while, not even with himself. So what he did, was doing perhaps, was masturbate sentences. Was that what it was? Jerk them around to best advantage. Too often, when he woke after hours of sleep-ridden revision, exhausted from prolonged creative effort, only the worst versions of the sentences awoke with him. His memory, he had to remind himself, traveled poorly in the night.

  During the day, his sentences resisted change, stared back at him defiantly, warned him not to fuck with them. And what would happen if he did? What could a sentence do to him that it hadn’t already done? And why should it even concern him what his sentences might think? As they were his sentences, he could do with them as he liked. Couldn’t he? Only if he had the courage to risk the unspoken dangers that lurked on the other side of turning them about. Not everything was susceptible to improvement, a former wife used to say. And perhaps nothing was, when looked at in a certain light. And the problem, as he saw it, as he badly defined it, wasn’t something you could talk to your therapist or your wife about and expect useful response. And there was limited pleasure in it for him, revising sentences in his dreams, a few flashes of short-lived satisfaction, that’s all. And when you weighed that transient satisfaction against the loss of much-needed sleep, the end result was less than nothing.

  And then of course the product of his nighttime labors was always something less than itself in the morning, something or other slipping away. He kept a notebook and pen on an end table next to the bed to indemnify his altered sentences, but in the morning his writing implements were rarely where he had left them. One tended to fall to the floor on one side of the table, the other on the other side. They were like a bad marriage. By the time he retrieved them both, his sentence had miraculously restored itself to its original unsatisfactory form, and so there was nothing to write down. He imagined other remedies, kept a tape recorder at the side of his bed for a few days, but he had difficulty waking himself to speak into the microphone, which in no way violated his expectations.