The Pavilion of Former Wives

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “Was it anyone I know?” Julia asked.

  “I don’t think so. He’s some kind of lawyer. Actually, he’s quite nice for a lawyer. I’ll tell you about him when I see you.”

  Julia listened for subtext, but heard only what she was primed to suspect and perhaps not even that. The earliest they could get together was the following Monday.

  The magazine was sending her to the Athenaeum in Hartford to interview the new director and she e-mailed her old friend, mentioning the assignment, offering it as an opportunity to get together. Since their extended phone conversation, she had not received an e-mail in almost two weeks.

  Late in the day, when she had all but given up hearing from him, she got her answer. “As much as I’d like to,” he wrote, “I’m going to say no. I’ve spent hours shaping my reasons for you, but I suspect sending them to you would probably be redundant. I believe you understand probably better than I do why I can’t (or won’t) show up in Hartford to see you.”

  “You give me more credit than I deserve,” she wrote back. “It would not be redundant to tell me why you won’t come. There’s a lot I don’t understand, your reasons not the least of them.”

  A week passed without response, and she went off to the Athenaeum wanting to believe that he would show up unannounced and explain his silence, or apologize, or both. Or something. His almost presence haunted her day and a half in Hartford, and she found herself missing him and furious at him and expecting to run into him at every turn.

  On her return, she wrote a draft of a poem about being rejected at a museum while standing in front of a portrait of George Washington.

  At lunch with Marcia, whom she had either forgiven or no longer suspected of treachery, she said there seemed a kind of raw justice in his breaking off with her this way since it was she, walking on imaginary glass in Paris, who broke off their correspondence thirty-one years ago.

  “And what about your suspicions concerning Henry?” Marcia asked.

  “What suspicions?” she said. In any event, they seemed less troubling now. Whatever Henry was into, he was not going to throw her over on the basis of nothing much or whatever and perhaps she had imagined Henry’s sly infidelity because some part of her wanted him to behave badly.

  Marcia, on the other hand, was more interested in her own story at the moment.

  And then, how many months later, I noticed his name in someone else’s copy of The Village Voice while riding the subway home from work. I wondered if it was a misperception, so I picked up a Voice from a freebie distribution box when I got off the train to check it out. When I thought of him, which was not often, which was not all the time, I worried that his extended silence betokened failing health. Why else would he stop writing?

  It took a while to find the item, but Julia had seen what she had seen. He was in fact giving a reading of his poems—he was the featured reader in a group of three—in a small theater in the East Village from a new book recently published. And why hadn’t he mentioned that he had a book coming out? It was possible that he had and she had been too self-involved to take it in. She was eager to hear him read but she was uncomfortable with the idea of him seeing her in the audience, which invited—she was no stranger to the experience—a kind of decisional paralysis. A late-hour choice: she called Marcia and urged her to go to the reading with her.

  “Oh,” Marcia said, “I wish I could. I have something else on that I have to go to. I so much wanted to see what he looked like.”

  And so the burden was all hers. And, after two other unsuccessful calls, after going back and forth on the question, she decided to go to the reading solo.

  She arrived late—a male reader in his early fifties was at the podium—and she stood in the back until the performance was concluded. At first she didn’t look for him and then when she did, when she methodically searched the crowd, she didn’t see him anywhere.

  There were six rows of folding chairs, eight to a row with an aisle in the middle. It was a substantial crowd for a downtown poetry reading. All but three seats were taken—two of the unoccupied chairs in the first row, which had always seemed to Julia like putting oneself on display. Nevertheless, in the brief interstice between the first reading and the second, she ducked into one of the empty seats in the first row. The second reader was a younger woman who had recently published her first book. She read with her eyes on the page in a hushed, somewhat embarrassed voice. There was a shout of “louder” from behind Julia and the reader looked up from her text as if she had been slapped.

  The procedure, it seemed, was for each of the poets to introduce the succeeding one. Though there was still no sign of him, the second reader, with considerably more aplomb than she delivered her own work, introduced him.

  A flash of guilt passed through Julia, as if in imagining the worst (and how different, really, were imaginings from wishes?) she was responsible for whatever version of it had come to pass.

  He walked on a cane, though made an effort to appear vigorous, taking exaggerated strides as he approached the podium, entering from some back room where he had no doubt been gathering his strength.

  Though he had what she thought of as “hospital pallor,” he looked younger somehow than the last picture of him she had filed away in her memory. He caught her eye and smiled at her or at the woman on her left or at the elderly couple directly behind her.

  This is the fantasy she had while she half listened to him read his passionately ironic verse with a worked-up energy that seemed hollow and perhaps even desperate, his musical voice cracking from time to time: She imagined herself taking a sabbatical from work (also from her marriage, which was harder to conceive) and moving to Newton to look after him. If he was dying, which seemed at the very least a possibility, she would stay with him until the end. Otherwise—this second scenario was more difficult to envision—she would care for him until he was on his feet again, however long it took, and then return home or stay with him, whichever seemed at the time the right thing to do. In any event, she sincerely doubted Henry would take her back after her leaving him as she had no matter what she decided.

  The last poem he read was about a man waking up in a hospital room after an operation and perceiving himself in some version of the afterlife commensurate with what he deserved. The last part went something like, “The ghost he was rose from his bed and crawled hand upon hand into the greater dark.”

  When the reading was over, he got an extended ovation that moved her to the verge of tears. She had to wait in line to get to see him—he was stationed behind a table, signing books, a younger woman she had seen in the audience posted alongside him. She had no idea what their relationship might be. In resisting jealousy, she found its impingement inescapable.

  “Julia,” he said to her when she handed over his book for him to sign, “I can’t say how grateful I am that you came.” She exchanged suspicious nods with the younger woman standing to his right. He seemed even more deathly pallid up close. “Oh,” he said after returning the signed book, “this is my daughter, Kate. Kate, this is Julia, who was a student of mine at Stanford over thirty years ago.” A nod was exchanged between them.

  “Kate,” she said, taking a step to the side in prelude to walking away, feeling obliged to say something, “your father was absolutely the best teacher I ever had.”

  Though she usually resisted such extravagances, she took a cab home without once glancing at the inscription he had written. Henry was waiting up for her, watching a movie on television when she arrived.

  “I was at a poetry reading,” she told him, “by a poet who had once been a teacher of mine.”

  “I wondered where you had been.”

  Julia removed the book she had been carrying in her purse and handed it to her husband, who was a talented reader of poems, for his inspection.

  WALKING THE WALK

  Every morning, he gets up earlier than he had the day before, eager to get going with nothing in particular to do. He is exploding with
energy, is still a young man despite chronological evidence to the contrary. The house echoes with silence and it is a priority to him to escape even if it means walking in the dark, even if it means the defeat of inevitable return. If there were somewhere else to go (there must be, he tells himself, though his memory is not what it was), he would not come back. He is the only one out there, walking in the half-light (the half-dark?) who doesn’t have a dog with him as an excuse for his escape. The regulars say good morning or nod to him when he passes or look through him, wondering what he is doing out so early without the obligation of a dog at the end of his leash.

  He has thought of getting a pet, has imagined himself walking a dog, but that’s as far as it’s gone. If he knows himself at all, he knows he wants the dog only for the duration of the walk itself. After returning home, he and the dog would likely have nothing to say to each other. The dog would have to be fed. The dog would bark. The dog would wander around his house looking for something to occupy idle paws. A perfect solution would be to borrow a dog from some as yet nonexistent service on a daily basis to accompany him each morning, a dog that might be returned without much difficulty when their otherwise companionable walk was concluded.

  While walking unattached, solo as it were, his own dog, he sometimes wonders in his daydreamy way—his mind full of useful detours—if it wouldn’t be an interesting career move to create the very service he has been deprived of. “Walker Dogs: companions for the lonely. With the loan of a Walker Dog, you’ll never have to walk alone again. Canine companions in all weight classes.”

  That’s not the story he has set himself to write. In the germinal concept that inspired him to set words to page, Tristan, his protagonist, would meet someone, something would happen, a relationship formed—perhaps only in the imagination, which is the best kind for someone who has trouble getting along with others.

  Impeded by an almost imperceptible limp, a limp his most recent former wife used to make note of, Tris is committed to walking as briskly as he can for thirty minutes every morning regardless of weather, the worse the better. The slap of wind keeps him on his mettle.

  “You’re out early today,” she says to him after the “good mornings” have been exchanged.

  “You too,” he says, but since they are moving in opposite directions, circumstance forecloses further conversation.

  She takes turns running and walking her medium-sized, nondescript pet, occasionally singing to him or to herself. The dog’s name is something like Winnipeg. Something about the youngish gray-haired woman, whom he thinks of also as Winnipeg—names of people are rarely exchanged on these walks—engenders fantasy. He knows most of the dogs’ names on his walk and none of the owners’ names. He wonders if they, if she, thinks of him as the non-dog man.

  In his fantasy scenarios, Winnie is a single owner, but one morning he discovers Winnie’s dog attached by leash to someone other than the woman he has reinvented as an obsession. This is the first time he has seen the dog with someone else, a disconcerting revelation. It is not a husband walking the dog but another woman, a notably younger woman. They pass each other without acknowledgement, though the dog makes an abortive move in his direction.

  When in the course of his perambulations their paths cross a second time, Tris says, “Good morning,” and is answered in kind. “I’ve seen that dog with someone else,” he says.

  “That’s possible,” the woman says, moving on, and in the aftermath of this inconclusive meeting, he wonders if he’s misidentified the dog.

  “Is her name Winni?” he calls after her.

  “She’s a he,” she says, stopping briefly to answer, no further information offered.

  He modifies his scenario. Winni’s owner, the eponymous Winnie, is sick or busy and her younger sister, visiting from Ohio after a trial separation from her husband, has agreed to walk the dog in her place.

  When he gets home, he gives the scenario another twist. Winnie, that is Winni’s owner, is older than she looks, and the young woman walking the dog in her place is actually her daughter. This daughter, name to be discovered, has come home to stay with her mother after her marriage has come to an unlikely and surprising end, her husband leaving her for another man.

  Winifred (called Winnie) tells her daughter, Angela, that bonding with a dog (her own experience with Winnipeg confirming testimony) has a way of healing one’s sadness. And so as an initial step in the recuperative process, she lets the unhappy daughter take her sweet-tempered dog for his morning walk.

  “How did it go?” Winnie asks when Angela returns.

  “It was like almost fun,” Angela says. “I met the non-dog man you mentioned and he gave me the distinct impression that he missed you.”

  “Why would he miss me?” Winnie asks. “I mean, we hardly know each other outside of a few random encounters.”

  “I think he has a thing for you, Mom,” she says. “I really do. He gave the impression of being really disappointed that you weren’t there.”

  “You think?”

  Nevertheless, the next morning, when the non-dog man—he has begun to think of himself as such—crosses Winni’s path, the dog is attached to the daughter, Angela, once again.

  This time after they exchange “good mornings,” Angela stops briefly to let him pet the dog. After the vagaries of the weather have been sufficiently noted, she mentions that the woman he usually sees with the dog, the dog’s owner in fact, is her mother and that her mother sends her regards.

  Such news would have surprised him had he not already imagined the possibility of an intuitive sympathy between himself and Winifred. “Well, then when you see her,” he says, “thank her for me and give her my regards in return.”

  “Absolutely,” the daughter says.

  While waiting for the mother to reappear, the non-dog man discovers he is also attracted to the daughter, something that might well be a problem later on in whatever relationship develops with the mother. That Angela stopped to talk to him suggests, or so he wants to believe, some kind of rudimentary interest in him despite the obvious difference in their ages.

  He tells the daughter, a coded confession, that of all the dogs he meets on his morning walk, Winni is far and away his favorite.

  The next day, or is it the one after that, he is almost surprised, though not unpleasantly, to discover Winnie once again connected by stretch leash to his favorite dog. She seems pleased to see him—all those back-and-forth regards exchanged have changed the aura of their relationship—and, though usually careful not to give himself away, he responds in kind.

  “I’ve missed taking Winni for his constitutional,” she tells him, “but Angela needed him more than I did. He’s been a great help to her.”

  “That’s a great dog,” he says, for which she thanks him with some embarrassment, which he finds charming.

  Instead of taking his usual route, he elects to turn around and accompany the two Winnies in the opposing direction. They exchange generalized personal information as they walk along together, the dog between them like a chaperone. Winnie is a songwriter, she confides, who has had some professional success. After she sold her first song, she rashly quit her job as a copywriter, assuming—incorrectly, as it turned out—that she was moving into a new and lucrative career. Seven months later, she was again writing advertising copy, though working longer hours at a slightly reduced salary.

  He is more interested in hearing her story than relating his own, though common courtesy demands he give something of himself back. “I also write,” he says. “That is to say, I used to write.”

  “Are you a journalist?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what is it that you write? Is it some kind of secret?”

  “In a way,” he says. “My books are a kind of secret, though that’s never been my intention.”

  “Books? You said books, plural, right? How many are there? I’m impressed with anyone who gets published. Do you write mysteries? I’ll tell you right off I never
read mysteries, so I probably wouldn’t have heard of you.”

  “I write fiction but not mysteries,” he says. “And there’s no reason you would have heard of me. How many songs have you written?”

  “A lot,” she said. “Do you really want a number? I’ve written something like twenty-seven. Four of them have been picked up, a fifth is being considered.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “I’ll give you one of my books in exchange for one of your songs.”

  She doesn’t answer right away and it strikes him that his offer has embarrassed her. They watch her dog squat to relieve himself with the kind of attention usually reserved for museum walls or auto accidents. While she deftly collects the turds in a blue plastic wrapper, he looks off into the distance.

  Their conversation continues on his computer screen after he returns home, somewhat disappointed by their first extended encounter.

  “How long have you been living alone?” she asks him.

  The odd thing is he can’t remember how long it is, so he gives out the first number that comes to mind, which is eight months. It is actually closer to two years.

  A somewhat awkward dinner invitation follows, which he accepts with guarded eagerness, though, as he remembers later, he has something on for the same night so he has to call to change the date. He can tell from her response that she doesn’t trust his excuse. “I’m hoping for a rain check,” he says.

  “I’m not sure I know what that means,” she says, “but okay, if that’s what you want.” Nevertheless, no replacement dinner invitation is made.

  When he doesn’t run into her the next morning, he can only assume that she has changed her route in order to avoid him.

  He checks his watch and discovers that he is ten to fifteen minutes later than usual, which may explain missing her or may not. He replays the pivotal phone conversation in his mind and it never comes out the same way twice.