My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

  The multi-national company that manufactures the cereal with the cowboy’s pictures on the box also has in its employ an international ring of assassins. One of them has been assigned “to terminate” the cowboy’s career. The assassin, however, makes the crucial mistake of perceiving the false cowboy as the real one. I wake before the scenario can play itself out, the assassin waiting in ambush for the false cowboy’s scheduled arrival.

  What will the real cowboy do when he learns that his double has been killed in his place?

  In the real movie the cowboy redeems his debased life by trekking through beautiful countryside accompanied by a woman and a horse, avoiding unseen pursuers.

  The plane begins its descent, stuttering slightly as it falls, the sky darker as we come closer to the earth. I reach in my jacket pocket for a stick of gum, come out empty-handed. Ears ache as if wooden nails had been driven into the drums on each side. I am not ready to come down.

  I can imagine my father, beardless with two days growth, sitting in one of these black director’s chairs, his legs crossed, an unattended cigarette smoking in the ashtray. He is going through the manuscript of a screenplay, making notes to himself in the margin with a red pen. The ending isn’t right, isn’t right as an ending or isn’t right as the last scene of this particular film. It’s even possible that the ending is not at fault in itself but symptomatic of the failure of the whole work. My father has been too long on this screenplay to know, has lost all sense of balance. His watch, which he glances at to gauge the time he has before leaving for the airport, has stopped, something he won’t discover until hours later. If he intends to take the car to Heathrow, he’ll have to leave the house in fifteen minutes, he thinks, though in fact he is already several minutes late.

  The plane comes out of its descent, begins to level off, offers the illusion of rising again. The man next to me says that he heard there was an Air Traffic Controller’s strike at Heathrow and that we would have difficulty landing.

  “What a bore!” one of the English ladies in front of us says.

  I am in no hurry, consider the possibility of the plane hanging around for awhile. It’s been my limited experience that anything is possible. The fantasy wills itself. One of the emergency doors is suddenly blown open and everything not nailed down is sucked into the maelstrom of the sky, three hundred or so passengers dropping into London like a rain of hailstones.

  I try to imagine what it would be like to fall into my father’s life like a bomb.

  2

  In the final scene, his hero, the international detective Henry Berger, would track the conspiracy to some unnamed European country and into a palace of mirrors to be cut down at gun point as he enters the building by the one person he continues to trust. The film would stop just as the bullet struck him, or fractionally before, a look of astonishment and disillusion on Henry Berger’s face, the reflection of it echoing through the maze of the room. “I love it,” Max Kirstner said, “but is it, I wonder, absolutely on the mark? Irony tempered by human understanding. This script must be beyond bloody reproach, my friend, or so subversive that the sharpest accountant in the industry doesn’t know he’s being had. What it wants at this stage is a touch more compassion.” He spoke, particularly when the news was bad, at astonishing speed.

  Terman agreed to study the director’s notes and the inane jottings of some producer’s reader, which is to say he kept his disagreement unspoken. A year ago almost to the day, Max had pronounced the screenplay “beautiful beyond my wildest hopes.” “A few cosmetic changes,” the director had said, “and we’re in business, son.” Three drafts later—it was a collaboration in which Terman did the writing and the director suggested other possibilities—they seemed only infin-itesimally closer to a shooting script. With each revision, new problems of strucure and conception arose. Someone who mattered—sometimes it was Terman himself—was always unsatisified.

  He was revising the closure, had put Henry Berger, and the unnamed woman with whom he traveled, on a flight from London to New York. He was due at Heathrow himself in little over an hour. Before leaving for the airport, he called Isabelle at the most recent work number she had given him, wanting to heal the wounds of the previous night. She wasn’t at that number, he was told, after having been held on the line for ten minutes, was working today at some other studio. Did they have another number for her? They didn’t or were opposed to giving it out, kept him waiting as they debated the issue outside his hearing. If they wouldn’t give out her number, would they call her themselves and say that Lukas Terman was trying to reach her? The woman on the other end said that it was not a question of not wanting to give out a number but of not having a number to give out. He didn’t believe it, said, overstating, that it was an urgent matter, that the news he had for Isabelle was something she had been waiting to hear. “That’s not my problem, is it?” said the woman. “I’ll take down your number. That’s the best I can do.”

  He wrote Isabelle a note in case she returned in his absence and propped it up with a paperweight against the phone in the kitchen.

  Deciding she might go right by it if she were in a hurry, he took it up to their bedroon and laid it out on her pillow, though he was not fully satisfied with that placement either. After going down the stairs, after putting on his corduroy jacket, he returned to the bedroom to retrieve the note, reading it as if with Isabelle’s eyes.

  Dear I,

  Gone to Heathrow to get Tom. Sorry about last night. Put it down to gracelessness under pressure, or try to imagine it never happened. I regret my behavior and admire your forebearance. I mean to do better in the future. Love—

  Terman

  He was out the door with the note folded in his jacket pocket when he thought to go back and leave it on the kitchen table. The details of his return were exactly as he had imagined them: the undoing of the bolt lock, retracting the catch with second key, going through the front parlor (that enormous room), into back parlor, into dining room, taking a right turn into the kitchen, putting the note down on the table where it couldn’t be missed, a butter knife across it to hold it in place, then the same trip in reverse order, remembering to double lock from the outside, hurrying to his car.

  Driving to the airport through unyielding traffic, he decided that the note was an ill-conceived gesture, that Isabelle would more readily forgive him if he hadn’t apologized than if he had. It was also possible that, taking him at his word, she wouldn’t return to the house at all. He had suggested (the suggestion seeming to make itself), that she spend the first night or two of Tom’s visit at her own place.

  “It makes a lot of sense,” she said and went up to the bedroom to pack a few things.

  He found her sitting on the bed in an uncharacteristically crumpled posture, an empty suitcase on her lap. “It’ll only be for a day or two,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said in a hurry.

  “What are you thanking me for?” She tended to express gratitude at the most inappropriate moments, a source of small irritation to him.

  “For being straightforward with me.” Her lip quivered. She was not given to excesses.

  He took the suitcase from her lap and sat with her in silence, his arm draped around her shoulders, until it was time to go to bed.

  “If you don’t mind, I want to stay at my own place tonight,” she said. “You won’t make it difficult for me, will you?”

  “Does it make it difficult if I say I don’t want you to go?”

  “Of course it does,” she said. “You damn well asked me to leave, didn’t you?”

  He repeated her name in exasperation, a litany of Isabelles.

  The signs pointing him to the airport led him there. As he entered the building, his doomsday premonitions slipped away. The first thing he did was to go to the bathroom to empty his bladder of, as it turned out, illusion. His hair was in terminal disarray, and he wet it down, combing it with his hand, which was no improvement. He had a rash on his forehead, a port
ent of bad weather from within. When he got out of the bathroom he followed the signs to Immigration and lined up on the other side of the rope to wait for Tom. There were four booths out of a possible nine in operation, passengers from a mix of two or three flights filtering through. Terman hated to wait, hated to stand in one place without other occupation, suffered loss of time as if it were (as it is) an incurable disease. He memorized the faces of people coming through, committed to not missing a thing, dimly worried that he might not recognize his son. Who can explain associations? It struck him that the grail (was that his idea of Tom?) only revealed itself to the pure in heart. He interrupted his vigil from time to time to check his watch which, it suddenly dawned on him, had had the same time for the past two hours. He could almost admire its constancy.

  “I know you,” a woman said to him. She had come up to him from the blind side, surprising him in an unacceptable way. “You may not remember me.”

  “No,” he said, not looking at her. “I don’t.”

  “Aren’t you Lukas Terman? You knew me as Lila Parsicki. My former husband and I lived in the same building as you and your wife—I mean of course your former wife. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.”

  He looked at her for the briefest of moments, withheld recognition. “You have the wrong bridge,” he said, affecting a faint European accent.

  “I’m sorry to have interfered with your privacy,” she said in a sarcastic voice, offering him a view of her back. Though physically round, heavy-breasted, moon-faced, big-hipped, her manner was all angles and sharp points. He remembered her with marked displeasure, and moved away into the underbrush of the crowd.

  The moment he forgot about her, she was at his elbow again. “You shouldn’t lie to people,” she said. “It’s not the least bit nice.”

  “Excuse me,” he said in his mock-German accent.

  She thrust her face into his, as close as it might get given that he was six or seven inches taller. “I said I don’t like to be lied to,” she said.

  He regretted his imposture, though he was unwilling to give it up, stared ahead blindly, neglecting his relentless vigil.

  There was no sign of Tom as far as he could see and Terman reasoned the boy had missed the plane, or had decided at the last possible moment not to make the trip. His reaction to the possibility of Tom’s not coming at all—relief perhaps one aspect of it—was without definition. Terman also wondered whether it was conceivable that Tom had passed through without being recognized by his father.

  Lila joined the people she was with, then—her tenacity frightening and marvelous—returned to his ear. “Is it that you’re hiding from someone?” she asked. “Believe me, I have no intention of revealing your innermost secrets.”

  The more he ignored her, the more lethal her voice became. “Don’t you think it’s cruel to pretend not to know someone? It’s the most awful thing, believe me, to have your view of reality denied. Are you trying to make me doubt my whole system of perception? Is that your intention? I can’t believe you’d be so heartless.”

  Even if she were in the right—surely the crowd must recognize that—her reaction was far in excess of provocation. He strove for a posture of heroic (and compassionate) indifference.

  “It’s not true that he doesn’t know me,” she said in a strident voice, attracting the embarrassed attention of a half a dozen people around them. “It’s not true and he knows it’s not true.”

  She went on in the same vein, pleading her case to a circumstantial jury, increasing the stakes of her complaint. He had ruined a number of women, she said, had humiliated them in unimaginable ways. Terman stared at the floor, refused to acknowledge that the outburst of this impossible woman concerned him.

  As gratuitously as she started her assault, Lila gave it up. The potentiality of its return filled the air like some unaccountable hum. When he felt he could do it inconspicuously, he looked around to see where she had gone. Their eyes met—she had been waiting for him to seek her out—and she mouthed, “I’m still here.”

  He had a momentary loss of focus where he had to remind himself why he was there, studying the illegible faces of people he didn’t know and was not likely to see again. The crowd thinned and after awhile he discovered himself its sole survivor. Even Lila had gone on to other business. It seemed uncanny that he and Tom should miss connection.

  He had Thomas Terman paged over the loudspeaker and when he heard the mostly familiar name in the air, he had the urge to answer the call himself.

  The international long distance lines were oversubscribed and Terman had to wait for the longest time before he could get his call through to New York.

  “Is something wrong?” Magda asked as soon as she recognized the voice.

  “I was going to ask you the same question. Did Tom make his flight?”

  She sighed, a woman who valued competence above all other virtues. “As far as I know. Isn’t he there with you?”

  “You saw him board the plane?”

  “I would have heard from him by now if he hadn’t gotten on. How could you have missed him?”

  “Magda, he wasn’t there. I waited for him at Immigration for over an hour.”

  She made a groaning sound. “You’d better do something to find him. If you want my advice, that’s what it is.”

  His pose of sensible concern at great distance from what he really felt, he said, “I’ll keep in touch, Magda.” He swallowed the name.

  She said nothing he could hear, withdrawing from the connection like someone backing out a door.

  He had Tom paged one more time. The call produced Lila Parsicki who sidled up to him just as he was leaving the Pan Am desk. She thought he ought to know, she said, moments before he arrived someone who resembled the Tom she remembered, though he was just a child when she’d seen him last, had passed through Immigration and gone on without stopping. “What did he look like?” Terman asked.

  “He had the same blue eyes as Magda,” she said.

  It was not impossible. Terman reconstructed the scene. Not seeing his father as he came through Immigration and unsure of the arrangements they had made, Tom had assumed that he was supposed to go on to his father’s house in London and had proceeded accordingly. The misunderstanding was grave but forgivable. With barely a nod of thanks to Lila for her information, he hurried off to his car and fought his way back through traffic in half the time of the original trip.

  The Holland Park house was dark on his return and Terman rang the bell to no answer before letting himself in with his key. He made himself a double Scotch with Perrier water, sat down on the least comfortable chair in the front parlor and wondered what steps a man in his situation ought to take next.

  A few minutes after he decided that the next move was Tom’s the phone rang. It took him a while to answer, undecided as to which extension to pursue, though he was naturally eager to get the news.

  The voice was not the one he expected so diasappointed him, the disappointment mingled with relief. It was Isabelle’s husky purr at his ear. She was staying with a friend in Battersea, would see him, she said, tomorrow or the day after. He didn’t urge her return, although it was a recurrent intention. “I can’t live without you,” he said to her at some point, which produced a moan or a laugh. No mention was made of his son, no questions asked.

  He sat up by the phone in his study, kept close watch on it, awaiting Tom’s call, but after a while he dozed in his chair and when he woke up it was the next day.

  The morning passed without word from Tom. The only call had been from Max Kirstner to remind him of an appointment at his office for two that afternoon. Terman didn’t mention Tom’s disappearance, said he would be by as arranged, though when he was off the horn he had the distinct recollection that their appointment had been for the following day. Max never had to change his mind; he just revised the past.

  The fourth complete version of the “The Folkestone Conspiracies” was opened in front of him on the
desk and though he couldn’t bear to look at the screenplay again, he read through the opening scene.

  THE FOLKSTONE CONSPIRACIES

  Screenplay by Max Kirstner and Lukas Terman

  The screen is gray, almost black. If we look closely enough, we can make out the silhouette of a man. He could be anyone. He seems to be speaking, though perhaps the voice comes from elsewhere.

  Voice: I cannot reveal my identity to you at this time. If it were known that I was telling you this story, I would be permanently silenced, rubbed out as if I were no more substantial than a typographical error. I mention this so that you will excuse the rudeness of my not showing my face. The story I am to tell is true, as true as any story you’re likely to be told in the dark. My connection to these events is not important. Let it be said that I had a seat on the periphery of the action. The story starts—I was about to say our story, but unfortunately the story at the moment is mine alone—in a European country known for its neutrality in international affairs. A shabby, unprepossing man of early middle age, rumored to have some connection with Interpol, has arrived this morning and taken a room in the capital city’s second finest hotel. On his visa where it says profession, he has written “Journalist.” Where it say purpose of visit, he has written “Holiday.”

  The gray screen seems to be a curtain and is pulled open to reveal the registration desk of the Hotel Candide.

  Attendant: You are in Room 917, Monsieur Berger. The room you request is occupé, though you will find the one we have given you has nothing to be said against it.

  Berger: Who may I ask is Room 1017?

  Attendant: It is in the process of renovation.

  We cut abruptly to the small elevator as Henry Berger gets in. As the doors close, we see a tall man wearing dark purple gloves, bis face obscured, say something to the desk clerk. The clerk looks puzzled, shakes his head.