B

by Jonathan Baumbach

  I tended to see Rebecca either not at all or three times a week in her TriBecca loft, discussing commitment or my lack thereof, eating and being eaten, wooing (the wooing our most passionate act), and fucking, going home forlorn at two every morning convinced that this time it was irrevocably over.

  Then there was Jane, who I haven’t mentioned before, an old flame, who I met once every two weeks for dinner. We were each other’s confidantes—in some ways a more intense intimacy than sex—and I discussed things with Jane about Rebecca, Genevieve and Anita I had mentioned to no one else. We were the other’s main source of support, which sometimes led to extended hugs, which in turn led (how imposingly intimate our conversations) to barely resistible desire.

  We flirted with the possibility—it was always there like a subtext—of becoming lovers again, and every once in a while, usually after a few drinks, one of us would make a move toward the other. What do you think? one of us would say. What do you want to do? was the answer. What do you want to do? was the answer’s echo. By that time, the sense of urgency had abated. We danced on the precipice of trespass and one of us, not always the same one, would always pull back at the last moment. That it hadn’t happened didn’t rule out that it might happen eventually.

  B tends to lose sight of his subject, which in this case is A, the woman who employed him as an unnamed character in her book. She seems overjoyed to see him when he arrives at her apartment, a corner of the mouth smirk on her face, an unlisted smile with an underground subtext—a smile which says to him, Your secret whatever is mine, and mine whatever is yours. B wonders where such presumed knowledge comes from.

  When they walk together in the city streets, A takes his arm, hooks her hand under his arm in a casually possessive manner. She has caught him, madness tells him, he will never get away.

  It troubles B that he has unwittingly given the woman the wrong impression concerning his intentions, which are a coded text indecipherable even to himself. It’s also possible that A has willfully misread him. She tends to show inappropriate, as he sees it, pleasure on his arrival at her place, her insinuating smile in full blossom, which is at once gratifying and frightening. Whatever it is she imagines herself to want from him is clearly more than he is prepared to give.

  Whatever is going on remains on her part insidiously implicit. This is not something he can say to her over lunch at the Hunan Adventure or even afterward when they are in her apartment and she is praising one of his books or making coffee for him in her espresso pot. To say any of the things he is feeling would be presumptuous on his part and not a little insulting so of course he says nothing.

  He can’t tell her that as much as he enjoys her company he also wants to get away, wants to get away and never return. That is one of the secrets he has that, despite her knowing manner, she is unable or unwilling to penetrate. B is in constant imaginative flight from the encroachments of intimacy.

  The truth is, A makes no overt demands on him, doesn’t complain about the conflicting signals he offers. Her demands, which he imagines to be extensive, remain unannounced. She wants the unimaginable from him, and deceives him by asking for nothing. It is her slyness that concerns B, it is her slyness that sets off alarms, that sparks an instinctive wariness.

  B moves in and out of A’s life as though she were a novel he was reading he had put down and picked up and put down again. He values the book most when it is out of his hands, when it is on the verge of being lost. A is almost always available to see him when he calls, she never (like some others) complains of the vagaries of his comings and goings. She understands and forgives, perhaps even dotes on, his bad behavior. She’s seen it all before.

  One time he dropped in on A without calling first only to discover she had another date. She was apologetic, though of course had no reason to be, offered to let him stay at her place while she was gone, insisting she would return in a few hours. B declined her offer and went off to a movie by himself.

  Afterward, calling first, he dropped in on R whom he hadn’t seen in almost a month, and they argued into the early hours mostly about his behavior, about which R was unsparingly critical. When he gave up defending himself and made ready to leave, R became forlorn, apologized for her “brattiness” and threw herself on him, pleading with him to stay, pressing herself against him.

  I hated it when Rebecca became frantic and demanding because it ultimately compromised us both. If I yielded to her as I mostly did, I tended to feel manipulated afterward and consequently angry at us both. If I resisted her pleading and carried through my initial intention, which usually meant leaving her to go home, I would feel equally bad for being the occasion of her pain. I took no pleasure in the gratuitous power her vulnerability acceded to me. I felt responsible for Rebecca, which made me want to run from her all the more.

  And yet I couldn’t stay away, couldn’t stand not to see her for prolonged periods of time. Something about her touched me deeply. When she wasn’t complaining or frantic, she could be charming and precocious in her girlish way—the smartest and sexiest child of 28 imaginable. I couldn’t stay away from her and, when with her, I couldn’t get away fast enough.

  We were driving each other crazy and I didn’t know how to break the pattern.

  Jane advised me in her unassertive way to stop seeing Rebecca, said it seemed to her that things would only get worse. We were in her living room at the time, sitting apart on her striped Salvation Army couch, trading confidences. I defended Rebecca to her, said she was not as crazy as I made her seem.

  –She’s probably worse, Jane said, but you don’t want to stop so you won’t.

  I had recently stopped therapy and my conversations with Jane became an unwitting replacement.

  The next day, with the intention of breaking up with Rebecca, I called her and asked her to meet me for lunch at a restaurant near her loft.

  –I can’t, she said. I really don’t want to see you any more. Okay? Okay?

  I might have accepted her verdict and got off the phone but instead I said, –Don’t you think we ought to discuss this in per-son?

  –I want to end it just like this, she said, okay?, and then, allowing me two heartbeats of unspoken response, hung up.

  My first impulse was to congratulate myself at having gotten out of this mess so bloodlessly. My second was to call her back and demand an explanation. My third impulse was to appear at her door and tell her that I realized I loved her and would see her from now on on her terms, which is to say to the exclusion of other women. I imagined taking her to bed as if it were again the first time. The pleasure, as always—as sometimes—was intoxicating. I played scenario three out in the imagination from first act to last talking my way through the door, gradually appeasing her tactical resistance, holding her hand, listening to her music, dancing with her, going down on her, fucking her, lying with her in her bed, fucking her again. And then afterward the old bitterness on her part surfacing, the free-floating jealousy, the claims of grief and despair.

  The imagined scenario foreclosed the possibility of a real one. Having played out my options, I was content to let matters stand as they were. I made no attempt to get back in touch with Rebecca. I felt disburdened.

  Following my pattern, which was to move from one woman to another, I arranged to see Anita that evening. At first I was glad to see her-how reasonable she seemed compared to sulky Rebecca— but then my pleasure in her company began to fade. It was as if whatever we were doing—talking, hugging, sharing a meal—we had done before and done more interestingly before. I made some excuse to leave early (said I wasn’t feeling well) and went home. Anita gave me a homeopathic medicine called Echinacea to take along—she said it had cured a friend who had been given up for dead—and I somehow managed, after putting the bottle of pills in my jacket pocket, to come away without it.

  When I got home I discovered I really wasn’t feeling well and took a couple of aspirin and, though it was only 10 o’clock, got out of my clothes and went t
o bed. The phone woke me at three a.m. and I struggled to get out of bed—I was feverish and my legs ached— to reach the phone in time. I thought I answered (it was someone speaking Spanish), but it turned out to be a dream. I never got out of bed.

  In the morning I staggered about the house looking for a thermometer, which I vaguely remembered seeing somewhere or other, in the night table drawer or in the medicine cabinet, the image of its presence precise and variable. Not finding it in its place, I wrapped myself in my covers and went back to sleep.

  Again the ringing of the phone woke me. I was surprised to find Rebecca on the line and the conversation, which was actual, turned out to be more dreamlike than the one I had in my dream in the middle of the night.

  –I’ve missed you, she said in her childish sing-song. I want you to come and see me if that’s what you want.

  –I’m sick, I said. I don’t have the strength to get out of bed. A silence followed in which I sensed her assessing my claim. –I’m so sorry, she said. Are you sick sick?

  Her question puzzled me, seemed in my feverish state to contain its own echo. –I can’t find the thermometer so it’s hard to say.

  She laughed nervously. –You’re not putting me on, are you? You’re truly sick? You sound sick to me.

  I was shivering and in reaching for the covers, which I meant to throw over my shoulders, I dropped the phone. When I recovered it, which was mostly a slow-motion operation, Rebecca was gone. I crawled back under the covers and yielded to the spell of my fever, slipped into dreams no more preposterous than the phone call I had to rehearse in my mind not to forget.

  Two hours later, feeling a little better, I phoned Rebecca as a kind of reality check. –Did you call a while ago? I asked her.

  –When? she asked in a wary voice.

  –Then I must have dreamed your call, I said. I’m sorry I bothered you. Though strange, it was extremely real.

  –Why did you hang up on me?

  –You’re giving yourself away, I said. I didn’t hang up on you. I dropped the phone.

  She cackled. —If I believe that, I’ll believe anything, right? Would you like me to bring you some chicken soup? I could also bring a thermometer if you haven’t found yours.

  –Okay, I said.

  –Tout al’heure, she said.

  I was feeling a little better after that—the promise of being looked after sufficed for the thing itself—and I got dressed and went downstairs and had some breakfast. When Rebecca appeared two hours later with an overnight bag and a brown bag of wholistic health-food groceries, prepared to nurse me through a long illness, I was sitting at my computer, working on my novel.

  I found her nursing mode unaccountably attractive, and I put my arms around her sinuous frame, but she slipped away to get her thermometer. She was as always single-minded. She had come to visit my illness, to play with it and improve its disposition, and would not be distracted by concerns outside her immediate agenda. I was obliged to play sick for her, gave myself over to her uncompromising ministrations. Her thermometer ravished the delicate membranes under my tongue. My temperature was disappointing, barely over a hundred, my illness a contemptibly small thing, unworthy of the sacrifice she had come to make.

  –You may be someone who doesn’t run a high fever, she said, making excuses for me to cover over her disappointment, yes? I nodded ambiguously. Tea came next, fortified with honey and lemon juice, followed by chicken broth, which I took sitting up in bed, pillow fluffed behind me, trying to be a patient worthy of her commitment to heal.

  B’s friends, men and women alike, tended to invite him to dinner parties in which there were unattached women in assemblage, the impulse entrepreneurial and generous, perhaps even authorial. B did the correct thing at evening’s end and escorted the women home, the ones who didn’t live too far out of his way, the ones who didn’t have their own transportation. That’s how he met V, who had been widowed barely a year ago, and was invited to dinner by mutual friends to meet B. At this point B had recently broken up with R and had been seeing A (the woman who would one day fictionalize him) with increasing irregularity and so he saw himself as relatively unattached.

  When V invited him up for a drink, B hesitated before accepting. It was already past midnight and he had a long drive home. He saw himself as being open to whatever came next, whatever the situation offered, nothing foreclosed in advance, so he went up to see what about V her apartment revealed, promising himself in advance not to stay more than an hour. Unlike A and R and to some extent even J, V lived like an adult, had an ample apartment with furniture that had not been picked off the street or bought on sale at the Door Store.

  V offered him a brandy which he declined, opting instead for club soda or water, and they talked about nothing much for a while, enlarged small talk, facing each other in her showcase living room, couch to arm chair, and then he went home.

  The next day, the woman who had invited them to dinner called to ask if he had left a blue cashmereblend scarf at her apartment. In the course of the conversation, she asked, not wanting to pry of course, how he had gotten on with V.

  –I liked her, he said.

  –That’s a diplomatic answer, the woman said. So it didn’t go so well, I suppose. It may be too soon for her, you know what I mean. Or maybe it’s too soon for you. Something like that.

  B saw no reason to be evasive. –I think we liked each other, he said.

  After the mutual friend hung up, while B was considering what he wanted to do in respect to V, A called and invited him to dinner that night. It was rare for her to call, which gave the invitation a certain authority it might not otherwise have had, and B, who had every intention of accepting, found himself saying that he had a prior commitment. That’s when he called V and asked her to have dinner with him. V said, groaning, that she couldn’t, she was sorry, then she said, before B could say he was sorry too, that she would see what she could do about getting out of her other commitment, which was really not firm, and call him back.

  B ended up going to V’s house for dinner that night, which was the night after he had taken V home from the party, and therefore sooner than might seem appropriate without giving, or seeming to give, the impression that he was pursuing her. Expect nothing from me, he felt obliged to say, but delivered the message implicitly instead through imperceptible gesture.

  This account is not about B’s relation to V, is only about it in regard to how it impacts on his relation to A. At least a month passed before B had communication with A again, A initiating the communication as she had the time before, catching him at home one evening while cooking dinner for his sons.

  As soon as I was indisputably well, which was two days later, Rebecca put her thermometer in its case and announced it was time to return home. There was something about the announcement that asked, virtually pleaded, for further negotiation. I thanked her for looking after me, sought out her mouth to kiss her good-bye.

  –I didn’t do it to be thanked, she said, lips in a pout, face turned away.

  I had said the wrong thing but what could I say to make things right—what was it she wanted to hear? –Why did you do it? I asked.

  –Because I care about you, she snapped.

  –If you care about me, I said, why are you so angry at me?

  –I’m angry at you because you don’t know why I’m angry at you, she said. I’m not really angry, I’m disappointed. To thank me is the most inappropriate and insensitive thing you could possibly do. Invisible flames emanated from her on all sides.

  –You’re beautiful when you’re impossible, I said.

  Rebecca almost smiled. –Anyway I have to go, she said. I’ve overstayed my welcome. And she was gone.

  I walked her to the subway, bought her a token.

  –You’re glad to see me go, aren’t you? she said.

  I didn’t deny it. No gracious half-truth, no credible lie, passed my lips. –I’m also sorry to see you go, I said.

  After passing thro
ugh the turnstile, she turned and called back to me. –Take care of yourself, she stage-whispered in a voice that turned heads. Next time you get sick, you might not find anyone to look after you.

  About a month after V entered B’s life, he stopped seeing virtually all the other women that filled his days, including A, his free time consumed by the new relationship. V, as I said before, is not the issue here, nor is G, to whom he was still married, nor is J, nor is R. Some time later, A showed up at a reading B was giving in a Soho gallery, made her presence felt by sitting in the center of the first row. Her insistent presence—V was also there—made B uncomfortable. It was as if she had some prior claim on him and had come to his reading to make him aware that she had no intention of stepping aside. He did what he could to disguise his panic, said hello to A, though his manner was distant and he sensed that she was hurt by it.

  He phoned her the next day to apologize but got her answering service and left no message.

  After that, A would call from time to time at odd hours, with odd sometimes unlikely requests. Sometimes she called without explanation and they chatted awkwardly, usually about something in As life, a horrific meeting with a former husband, a fight she had with her mother, a choice she had to make between two job offers. Though sometimes her calls interrupted his work, he never cut her off, let the conversation go on for as long as it suited her. It was as though he owed her something—kindness at the very least— though he could not say why, could not put his sense of obligation to her into words. He simply put himself at her disposal during these calls because that was what he could do for her. He didn’t welcome these calls, though he didn’t not welcome them either, didn’t try to evade them as he did his wife’s.

  It was in the way of things that A would call every once in a while, her tone always a little ironic, the same presuming smirk in her voice that she had in her glance when he met her at the writer’s colony years back.