My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

  She stopped what she was doing and stared cooly at him. “You’re not to be believed, are you? You’re just about the rudest person I’ve ever met in my life.”

  Tom walked out and came back, walked up the stairs and halfway down again. “Bitch,” he whispered, a secret he was unwilling to share. She was the one not to be believed, he thought, a mean-spirited, presumptuous shrew. He was aware of having made a terrible impression.

  He went upstairs to the unlikely room his father had given him and closed himself in with a self-dramatizing gesture. The door, that had appeared to bang shut, swung open. He crouched on the bed with his hand on the gun in his pocket, staring through tears into the shadows of the hall. His sense of grievance seemed a bottomless wound.

  When he heard Isabelle leave he picked up one of the London guides, pocketed the set of keys (though he had no intention of returning) and, after taking a granny smith from the kitchen, let himself out. The house, particularly the third floor, spooked him.

  He walked with his head down so was surprised to see Isabelle standing on the corner when he passed. She called to him or so he thought, hearing or imagining his name between them. “Tom?”

  He didn’t turn around, though considered the possibility.

  “I didn’t mean for us to get off so badly,” she said. “Sorry to be so shrill.”

  He turned and shrugged, felt himself immune to her seduction.

  “Where are you off to?” she asked.

  He withheld an answer, though it may only have been that he had none to give, shrugged his shoulders as if to say it’s of no importance.

  “You don’t know or you’re not telling?”

  “Come on,” he said. The kind of remark he would have made to his mother when he was fifteen. “I’m the rudest person you ever met in your life.” He walked along with her, some small distance between them, into Holland Park.

  It had never been his intention to accompany her; it was just that they happened to be going in the same direction, happened to be walking through an astonishing park across the street from his father’s house.

  They walked through a wooded path that screened out the sun, that seemed, for the few moments they were lost in its maze, like a dense forest. “Would you like to see the peacocks?” she asked him.

  If he were capable of being charmed, the question would have charmed him.

  He let her talk without offering anything in return, took pains to listen, was conscious of himself listening to her talk. At the same time—he rarely did fewer than two things at once—he found himself increasingly disturbed by the gun he had discovered in the bottom drawer of his father’s desk. It was not something Terman would keep unless he had a use for it. What worried him most was his father’s reaction when he discovered his revolver was missing.

  She showed him the peacocks and he said yes, they were amazing. One of them had its feathers unfurled and was running up and back, making an odd threatening noise. She put a hand on his arm to gain his attention. She said she believed the noise was a mating call, that it stood to reason, didn’t it? It seemed to him, he said, like some form of indigestion.

  When they got to the other side of the park she said she had a flat nearby and did he want to stop in for a bite of something. The offer tempted him which was reason enough to turn it down. He said he planned to spend the day, what was left of it, checking out London.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “When I come to a new place I want to get some kind of hold on it. Is that how it is with you?”

  “No,” he said, then laughed madly.

  He rejected her offer of food at least twice, stood in front of her building saying goodbye, before giving in to the afternoon’s destiny. Isabelle put out a plate of jam tarts on the kitchen table and made a pot of tea. As an afterthought she brought out some stale bread and blue-veined cheese and the remains of a spinach salad decorated with slices of hard-boiled egg. Tom looked at the off-white walls of the small unlived-in apartment, said her taste reminded him somewhat of his mother’s. There was one beer left in the otherwise bare refrigerator, a Watney’s Light Ale, which Tom agreed to drink only if she would share it with him.

  “Oh, Tom,” she said, “go all the way.”

  He had a heel of bread, a tiny wedge of cheese and slightly more than a half a glass of ale and felt inescapably in her debt. Assuming that his father was what he wanted to talk about, she told him that Terman, as everyone called him, was a difficult man to get to know, which he could have told her himself if she hadn’t been the one telling it first.

  “Does my father treat you badly?” he asked at one point.

  She said no, at least not in the obvious way, that she was the difficult one or at least equally difficult.

  He kept postponing his decision to leave until it seemed that if he didn’t make his move momentarily, he might never get out the door.

  “How did you meet him?” he asked.

  “I don’t know that I want to tell you that,” she said.

  He stood up abruptly, announced for the third or fourth time that he thought that he ought to go.

  She said she understood, that she had to go somewhere in a few minutes herself.

  Before he went out the door he thanked her for the food and they shook hands. She was as tall as he was (was it the heels she wore?) and their eyes met briefly in a way that frightened him.

  Isabelle asked him, prolonging the awkward gesture of his departure, if he was pleased to be in London. He shrugged and said nothing, waving to her as he left, backing out the door, aware that he had expected something to happen between them that hadn’t happened. He wondered what she made of his refusal to remove his coat.

  He walked quickly, compelled to create some distance between himself and the occasion of his embarrassing performance. The neighborhood changed as he walked north, changed from street to street, a sense of obscure privilege slipping away, a failing of light.

  Tom was looking in the window of a record shop when a young woman who resembled Isabelle, who at first he thought was Isabelle passed him in reflection. A moment later he saw her in a Newsagents shop—he was browsing in a magazine called Time Out— and listened in when the proprietor asked her about her father’s condition.

  She sighed before answering, her narrow figure weighted by trouble. “He came home from hospital yesterday,” she said. “They say it will take a bit of time before he’s himself.”

  “It’s my opinion time heals all wounds,” said the proprietor, an Indian or Pakistani. “Still, it’s a terrible shame such things are allowed to happen.”

  When the girl left the shop Tom found himself walking in the same direction a few steps behind. He fell into the rhythm of her walk, mimicked her brisk, small steps. When she stopped to brush something from her skirt, he caught up with her despite an inclination to linger behind. He thought to introduce himself, felt pressured to talk, though passed her with only the barest stirring of words.

  “Did you say something?” she asked.

  Up close she was another person, someone less compelling than his first impression suggested. Her complexion was marred; her chin pointed oddly; her eyes were too close together. He resisted disappointment.

  That she was less than beautiful made it easier for him to talk. He said what he had been rehearsing to say, that he had unwittingly overheard her remarks to the newsdealer and that he could understand how she felt about her father’s illness, his own father having been a chronic invalid for years.

  “How awful for you,” she said.

  “It’s more mental than physical,” Tom said. “He doesn’t have memory of certain things—I mean obvious things like the names of people he’s known all his life.”

  “That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?” she said without even the barest touch of irony. “My father’s memory since his return from hospital is like a loose connection. He has flashes of clarity and then nothing. He has these dreams about the two thugs coming at him from behi
nd and when he wakes up he’s so frightened he doesn’t know where he is. I have to sit with him until he gets back to sleep. He’s like a little child.”

  Tom commiserated, said he knew exactly what she meant, that his own father was not without certain childish characteristics.

  “You’ve lived with it longer than I have,” she said. “Next to people who are really badly off, I account myself fortunate.”

  They walked a little further together, then she touched his shoulder and said she had to go in. “If I’m not there when he wakes up he goes into a panic,” she said. He accompanied her to the door of the stunted frame house, noted that the address was 27 Foxglove Road. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  She was suddenly distrustful. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “A fatal attraction perhaps.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense, does it?” she asked, her seriousness without flaw. “I’m not a pickup if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  She called something to him as he walked away, her name, which he didn’t quite hear, which sounded like nothing he had ever heard before, the name of a flower perhaps. His face burned as if he had been slapped.

  A church was being torn down at the next corner and he stopped for a moment to observe. The spire, supported by cables on three sides, was making its anxious descent, seemed possessed by some separate will. He noticed that one of the cables was frayed and trembling, looked as if it would snap at the smallest provocation. The workers seemed unconcerned with the potential danger. One in fact was smoking a cigarette with his back to the trembling cable. Tom called to him to look out. When he got no response—perhaps the danger was less than he imagined—he broke into a run, vaguely panicked by something. Two dark-skinned men were coming toward him in a way that seemed ominous. They opened a space for him to pass between them, a smallish space barely large enough to avoid contact. A slash of laughter pursued him. At some point he thought he heard the cable snap and an ancient voice cry out in pain or surprise. He never looked back.

  He stopped at a fruit stand and bought a peach for ten pence. On the next street, a less disheartening one than the two preceding it, there was a Bed and Breakfast sign in one of the windows and, after passing the house, Tom returned to ring the bell.

  A large distracted woman with chalky yellow hair led him to a small lightless room on the third floor, a single window offering a view of the faceless brick apartment building across the street. The room was closetless, was furnished with a narrow bed, a wardrobe permanently ajar, a mahogany-veneer dresser and a small chintz-covered stuffed chair. An additional chair might be supplied, she said, if the tenant required more than one. There was a bathroom down the hall he might want to inspect, which had a new plumbing system.

  “How much?” he asked.

  She showed him the bathroom and another room on the floor, which she referred to as a kitchen, a closet-sized space with a two burner hotplate and a refrigerator slightly larger than a bread box.

  “Twenty pounds a week including continental breakfast,” she said.

  “How much is it without breakfast?” he asked.

  The question distressed her, caused her eyes to narrow and her shoulders to quiver under an invisible weight. “It’s the same,” she said, “with or without the breakfast. If you looked around, I’m sure you noticed that you can’t do any better than what I’m asking.”

  Tom went into his pants pocket and took out a twenty pound note. “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” he said.

  “You can move in anytime,” the woman said, folding the twenty pound bill in thirds and putting it in the pocket of her housedress. “I don’t care what you do in that room as long as everything is kept in the same condition you find it. I’ve made an inventory of each and every item in your care.”

  He went back into the room to see if his memory of it had survived the passage of fifteen minutes. When you approached it without expectation of grace or charm or comfort, the room wasn’t bad at all. The landlady waited for him in the hall, her demeanor faintly ironic as if she knew some minor fraud were being perpetrated on one or both sides.

  “I suppose you’d like a receipt,” she said as if the request (he hadn’t made) was the first excess of many she might expect from him.

  He wouldn’t have been surprised if she had propositioned him in the next breath, or accused him of coming on to her with lecherous intent. If she weren’t watching him, he might have stashed the gun in one of the dresser drawers, its insistent weight burdening his hip. Guarding the door like a jailer, she asked him again if it would please him to have a receipt.

  He said, joining her in the hall, that the room was exactly what he wanted and he would move in that evening.

  The receipt, written in illegible hand, was on a half-sheet of letterhead, the landlady’s name and address printed at the top. O. Chepstow, Fashion Specialist. 62 Wornington Road. London W2.

  Tom was outside and halfway down the block when he realized he hadn’t gotten a key. Embarrassed at having to come back, he hesitated at the door, his finger in the air. The imposing figure of O. Chepstow appeared just as he pressed the buzzer or even perhaps an instant before. She held out an open hand, two keys in her massive palm, as if she were feeding a skittish horse. “I knew you’d come back,” she said.

  “I couldn’t keep away,” he said, mirroring her grim smile.

  When you thought of one thing leading to another, this was the other led to by the first. Tom had gone into a W.H. Smith’s with the idea of getting himself a notebook in which to keep a journal, an activity urged on him by his mother. When he left the store he had handguns in both jacket pockets, the second a toy that bore the real one a more than generic resemblance. Impressed with the toy’s verisimilitude, he had put it in his left hand pocket as counter ballast to the other. Since the toy gun was nothing he wanted, nothing he had planned to buy, nothing he had even conceived a use for, he walked out without acknowledging the acquisition. He edged away from the store with his head down, keeping an even pace, expecting someone to come running up behind him calling “Thief.” His expectation unfulfilled, he spoke the word to himself, became his own accuser. The moment he felt free of pursuit, his exhilaration died. He walked around London for the rest of the afternoon, picking up odds and ends, escaping retribution, until it was almost dark. Then, after a series of phone calls, he slipped into his father’s house, repossessed his suitcase, and moved, body and baggage, into his new home.

  3

  Lukas Terman was in his study, obsessing over a line of dialogue, when the phone provided a not altogether welcome interruption.

  “I’m disturbed with something you’ve done,” Isabelle announced in a bristling voice.

  He couldn’t imagine what it was, thought his recent behavior beyond reproach. “I’ve been growing old, Isabelle, waiting for you to return,” he said. He felt himself aging as he spoke the line.

  “Not true, is it, that you accepted an invitation for us to go to Kent for the weekend? You don’t think you might have consulted me, Terman? Is there something about me, my line of work perhaps, that makes you think I’m incapable of making decisions for myself?”

  Her exaggerated outrage seemed out of character and Terman assumed she was still angry at him for having asked her to leave. “If you don’t want to go, we won’t go,” he said. “I’ve always had the greatest respect for your decision-making capacity.”

  “Max said you had committed us to this visit.”

  “Max was making trouble,” he said. “It’s how he keeps his hand in when he’s not working on a film.” He found himself in the throes of a rage that subsided as abruptly and mystifyingly as it arose. “Sweetheart, why don’t we continue this fight in person?”

  “Sweetheart yourself,” she said in a softer voice. “You know, Terman, it might be fun to have a weekend in the country, don’t you think? I’d rather like to go if
you can manage it.”

  “Let’s talk about it when you come over, Isabelle. We could all go out for a meal at Tethers or at that wine pub in Ladbroke Grove. Tom ought to be awake by then and if he’s not I’ll shake him out of bed. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

  “Terman,” she said, squeezing the name as if it were one long syllable, “just a bit ago I got a call from Tom. He told me he’s rented a Bed and Breakfast somewhere on the outskirts of Notting Hill Gate. Tom’s not in the house, is he?”

  He went upstairs to look into Tom’s room, then returned to the phone to acknowledge his inexplicable mistake. He had somehow assumed when Tom hadn’t shown himself that the boy was asleep in his room. The illusion of Tom’s presence gone, the house felt emptier than before. Isabelle said that she would come over to talk—the word talk emphasized—if he felt in need of company but she wanted it clear that she wasn’t going to spend the night. Terman said even if he were unforgivable, he thought that she’d have the grace to forgive him. The issue of her staying was left unresolved.

  “I have the feeling you’re angry with me,” she said.

  In the scene he had been reworking, he had left Henry Berger in a phone booth, though as he came back to it he was unable to determine the occasion. It troubled him only a little, this failure of memory, as if something in his own life he wanted to shake off.

  Berger was on the phone to Colonel Saracen, requesting a face to face interview (though that may have been a different time).

  Saracen: It’s good to hear your voice, boyo. Rumor had it that you had permanently lost your way.

  Berger: Could you meet me at the warehouse in Barking, Colonel, in, say twenty minutes. I have that information you’ve been after.

  Saracen: Can’t possibly make it. Not possible. Where are you calling from, Henry?

  Berger: Yes, well, I thought what I had might interest you.