My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

  She seemed scandalized by his offer, by the weight of its temptation. “What would you think of me, Tommy, if I took money from you?” She put her hand on his arm, then quickly drew it back.

  He offered a secretive smile in answer, felt for the first time in her presence a small breath of desire, an unanticipated wind from the south.

  Astrid got up from the couch and looked into her father’s bedroom. “He’s sleeping the sleep of the blessed,” she whispered, her finger over her lips. When she returned to the couch she sat with her leg pressed against his.

  His suggestion that they go for a walk was not premeditated, was impelled by the urgency of the moment. He had to get some air, he thought, or he would go out of his mind.

  She didn’t answer, seemed puzzled by his request. “Is it all right if I smoke?” she asked.

  What he wanted was more air, not less. “You don’t want to go for a walk or you don’t want to leave your father even for a few minutes?”

  She dug into her purse for a pack of mentholated cigarettes. “It’s all right here, isn’t it? I mean it’s not grand, but it’s all right.”

  “I wasn’t putting down your place,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite places outside the continental United States. I particularly like sitting on this couch.”

  “I think you’d really rather go for a walk. Isn’t that so?” She took his hand, swung it briefly then turned it loose. “What is this passion for walking, Tommy?”

  “What is this passion for sitting still, lady?” He stood up, made restless by the idea of sitting.

  The phone rang and she took it in her room with the door closed.

  The brief interlude seemed to revive her spirits. She was determinedly flirtatious on her return, offered him nothing beyond the transparent insincerity of her performance. “If you really want to do me a favor, Tommy,” she whispered, “you know what you could do?”

  “What could I do?”

  She smoked as if it were a form of nourishment, closed her eyes as she took sustenance. “I don’t think it right of me to ask,” she said.

  “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  She thought about it, tortured herself with indecision. “Would you”—she hesitated—“stay with my father this afternoon? Mary was supposed to come by but she had to do something else.”

  He said okay, thought to ask where she was going.

  She gave him his instructions and kissed him on the cheek, a sudden blossom of energy. “I appreciate this so much,” she said, putting on her coat. In a moment she was gone.

  Left to himself, he looked into Astrid’s room which he had never been invited to inspect. Except for a pair of flowered panties at the foot of the bed, the room was as tidy and impersonal as a monk’s cell. He sat on her bed, browsed in her meager library, studied the photos on her dresser top. Her life seemed pathetic and ordinary, even beyond what he had imagined, though he assumed the evidence was incomplete.

  He used Astrid’s phone to dial the number on the sheet of paper the landlady had given him. After the second ring he changed his mind and hung up.

  The old man, as he thought of him, was calling for something or hallucinating in his sleep. “I’m coming,” Tom said. There was no sound after that, not even the sterterous breathing that came periodically from behind the closed door. Tom peeked through a crack and saw Astrid’s father standing warily behind the door with a shoe in his hand as a weapon. “It’s the American boy, Tom,” he said. “Astrid’s friend, Tom.”

  When Tom got to the Green Park tube stop, Astrid was already there, looking for him in the wrong direction.

  She seemed out of breath. “I thought I was the one that would be late,” she said.

  As they walked into the park, she glanced repeatedly over her shoulder, wary of some invisible pursuer.

  There wasn’t an empty bench and he suggested sitting in the grass.

  I’m not dressed for it,” she said. “We could just walk about if you don’t mind.”

  He took off his field jacket, forgetting that the gun was in one of the pockets, and spread it out on the ground.

  “What’s that for?” she asked, her voice rising plaintively. “That won’t keep my dress from being squooshed, will it?”

  “You’ll be careful,” he said. “You’re a very careful person.”

  His remark creased her face like a shadow or a slap. He sat down first, then she sat.

  “It’s not comfortable,” she said, getting to her feet. She brushed the offending touch of his jacket from the back of her skirt.

  He remembered the gun, made certain it was still in his pocket before getting up.

  “What time do you have?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry about the time, okay? This is actually the first opportunity we’ve had to talk without your father in the next room.”

  She lifted his wrist to look at his watch, studied it a moment with vacant intensity. “It’s not going, is it? How am I supposed to know when to get back.”

  He shook his arm with clownish fervor until the watch took heart. After they had walked another five minutes he took a silk scarf from his jacket pocket and slipped it into her hand.

  She held it without looking at it. “It’s a Liberty’s, isn’t it?”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Liberty’s. Tyranny’s. It’s for you if you want it.”

  She seemed burdened by the gift, though also mildly exhilarated. She kissed him on both cheeks. “That’s the way they show their appreciation in France,” she said.

  “How do they do it in England?” he asked.

  Once they were out of the park she became fidgety again. “I should get back to work, shouldn’t I?”

  He walked her past Buckingham Palace toward Trafalgar Square then over to Haymarket to the American Express building. She was silent and he played the clown, told her jokes and anecdotes, desperate to amuse her. The more he insisted on his presence the less real it seemed to either of them.

  He asked her if he could pick her up when she got off and she said she thought they might be seeing too much of each other as it was. They shook hands.

  A moment after she went into the building she came out again and returned the scarf. “I can’t take this from you,” she said. “It’s beautiful and all that but I have no right to take anything from you.”

  He wasn’t looking at her, was looking everywhere but directly at her. “If you’re going with someone, that’s okay,” he said. “I’m not asking for anything.” He stuffed the scarf in her shoulder purse.

  “I’m off at six thirty,” she said in her plaintive voice.

  He said he would come back for her, though when she kissed him on the mouth—her lipstick had a faint cherry taste—it left him oddly frightened.

  5

  When Marjorie Kirstner came into the workroom she was wearing a gray silk blouse over her topless bikini. Only a moment ago (in sensed time), he had spied her from the window sunbathing in the back garden and her sudden presence—those large pointed breasts stretching the silk—had the quality of an illusionist’s trick. “Would a cold beer interest you?” she asked him. He had been lying on the couch, pages of manuscript strewn across his lap, working and sleeping, the two at once. Marjorie repeated the question, modified it. She was standing over him, legs apart, hands on hips, sucking on the fruit of her impatience.

  Terman raised himself into a sitting position, felt put upon by her intrusion.

  “Why are you the only one required to work?” she asked, leaving without his answer, angry at something. He stood up to meet her when she returned with two cans of Heinekens on a small tray.

  “Where’s your young lady friend?” she asked, giving him a beer he hadn’t asked for.

  “I’m not her keeper,” he said.

  “I’d have been most surprised if you were,” she said. “She seems a very independent young person from what I can tell. I thought your young friend might like to join us in the garden.”

  Terman said
he didn’t think his young friend was on the grounds, though he could see that Marjorie was indifferent to the news, had been making idle conversation. She hung on and, wanting her gone, he invited her to take a seat.

  “I have no intention of standing in the way of progress,” she said. “As soon as I finish my beer, I’m returning to the garden.” She looked out the window, studied the view with pointed amusement. “This room comes equipped with picture window, does it? I hope you enjoyed the view.”

  He pretended not to know what she meant.

  She straddled a chair for a moment or two and then suggested, as if the suggestion made itself, that they take a walk around the grounds. “There’s a body of water I’d like you to see.”

  “Is there?”

  “It’s a particularly lovely spot, very bucolic, very unspoiled, very relaxing.”

  “Is it a long walk?”

  “I promise I won’t tire you out,” she said, “though of course I have no way of knowing what your capacities are, do I?”

  He felt uneasy walking in the fields with her, suspicious and uncertain of what she wanted, wary of missing the point.

  Her chatter was compulsive and he tended to listen intermittently, feeding on the odd and interesting word.

  “How would you make me out in a novel?” she asked, the question addressed to herself more than to him. “You wouldn’t, would you?” she answered for him. “Not bloody likely…Terman, don’t you think it’s smashing here?” They could see the stream now through the arch of trees.

  “I never draw characters from life,” he said, “unless at wit’s end.”

  “You don’t? I never heard a real writer confess that before. What you’re really saying, isn’t it, is that I’m not interesting enough to be in one of your precious books. Not enough one way or another, I suppose.”

  “Too much both ways,” he said.

  “Yes? What does that mean exactly? Do you think I have an undeservedly low opinion of myself. It might be, after all, that I have a low opinion of what American writers find grist for their mill.”

  “It could be that,” he said.

  She took his arm and gave it back, nothing bought ever worth the price. “I talk too much out of school. You’ll forgive me if I overstated my case.”

  “Isn’t it better to be a character of your own creation,” he said, “than some shadow of yourself falsely and insufficiently imagined?”

  “I’ll take everything I can get, thank you,” said Marjorie. “And I’ll not forgive you for finding me insufficiently imaginable.”

  Her self-deprecation tired him and he walked along with her without further comment. She too was silent briefly, complainingly silent.

  “With a view like this,” Terman said, “I’m surprised you ever stay indoors.”

  “Max hates nature,” she whispered. “He’s supposed to be so visual and all that but I don’t believe he ever actuallly looks outside himself.”

  “That’s my story too,” he said. “The only things I ever look at are inside my head.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” she said. “I think you’ll say anything to make an effect if you don’t mind my saying so. Are you uncomfortable being alone with me? You’ve been unnaturally quiet, haven’t you?” She had an abrupt tentative walk as if not all the parts of her body were agreed on the same destination.

  “I’m looking at the sights,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I try not to disappoint.”

  “The sights, is that it?” She laughed loudly, too loudly. He could feel her unacknowledged complaint rising to the surface, making ready to join them in the open air, could feel it in the edginess she generated, could feel it in the novelistic view of her his imagination allowed.

  He was not a man to dissuade confidences even when he had no patience to listen to them or knew in advance, as he thought he did now, exactly what secrets awaited him.

  Marjorie informed him, in a voice that belied itself with irony, of being neglected by her husband, of the lonliness and humiliation attendant on such neglect. She talked of herself as if she were the orphaned heroine of a novel of unremitting banality. Her story, though in itself heart-rending, refused sympathy and so moved him by its reticence, touched him by failing to touch him.

  He kept his distance, was not about to make love to his employer’s wife, a rawedged, tight-nerved woman who publicly modelled her dissatisfaction.

  “It sounds as if you’ve been treated badly,” he said.

  “Like most people, I got what I bargained for, don’t you think?”

  The question requested denial and he said that he thought most people got worse than they deserved. He said he wondered why she had trusted him, a man she barely knew, with such personal news.

  She was telling him, she said, because there was no one else to tell and he had a sympathetic face—those blue eyes—and he was a writer whose work she admired. She had once read a novel of his that spoke to her.

  “What novel was it?” he asked, opening his attention to her.

  It was his first, she said, withholding the title, or the first that was published in the United Kingdom. It was she, in fact, on the basis of that book, who had brought him to Max’s attention and so had been midwife to what had turned into an extended collaboration.

  “Then he does respect your opinion,” Terman pointed out. “You can’t have it both ways.”

  “Max used to listen to me quite a bit,” she said, turning to look at something, some flash of movement, real or imagined, at the other side of the stream. “He’s not the same person he was. You’ve seen it yourself, haven’t you?”

  “What I hear you saying, Marjorie, is that you think Max has got someone else.” Terman had the momentary notion that his son was watching him from the deep brush on the other side of the stream. The notion was unsustaining, fled like shadows from a light.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” she was saying. “When you confront him with the news he denies everything, treats you like an escaped loony. He denies everything.”

  Her bitterness tortured her face. He wanted to ask her what had moved her in his book, though waited for a more appropriate time for his question. He had difficulty separating his own interests from the disinterest of listener.

  “Every woman who’s ever entered our house he’s managed to bed down one way or another,” she said.

  “You’re exaggerating, I think.”

  “Everyone,” she insisted, aware of the implication for Terman, a mad thin smile invading her stoic’s mouth. “I have evidence,” she added mysteriously. “What do you think Sylvie and I were talking about when you watched us from the window?”

  Her assertion evoked a passionate denial. “Marjorie, why should I watch you from the window?”

  She laughed, a temporary distraction from abiding discontent. “I was joking,” she said. “Didn’t you look even a little? I was hoping you’d look.”

  He said he regretted the missed opportunity, feeling the regret as he announced it. It was odd how language sometimes created a reality in its wake.

  “I forced a confession out of Sylvie,” Marjorie said. “She denied it at first absolutely and categorically and I simply said, Sylvie you don’t have to lie to me, I’m fully aware of what’s going on. She kept to her story until she saw that I wasn’t buying a word of it, then she admitted that she’d been sleeping with my husband on and off for three years. I was horrified. You’re a friend of mine, I said to her, how could you possibly do something like that? Max wouldn’t let me alone, she said. Then she cried and asked me to forgive her.”

  They came to a stile. “This is where our property ends,” she said.

  “How do you know there were others?” Terman asked.

  “You’ll find out about it soon enough,” she said. “When Max wants something—I know this from having lived with him for fourteen years—he’ll stop at literally nothing to get what he wants.”

  Her discontent seemed contagious.

  �
�He can’t help himself,” she said in his defense. “He’s addicted to having absolutely everything he wants.”

  “If what you say is true, why do you stay with him?” It struck him, listening to himself, that his question couldn’t have been more predictable and banal had she written his lines for him.

  “I really don’t see how I can continue living with him,” she said in a world-weary voice. “Yet of course one goes on, one must.”

  “We ought to be getting back,” he said. (He didn’t say that; it was what, not quite listening to the next stage of her confidence, he had wanted to say.) It was before or after she had turned her ankle by stepping on a rock or distended root and found herself unable to walk. She sat on the grass forlornly, alternatly squeezing and stroking the injured ankle to assuage the pain. Terman offered his hand, suggested she walk lightly on the ankle rather that let it stiffen up.

  “Don’t you see,” she said with sudden vehemence, “that this film your working on will never get made.”

  He was leaning over her, offering his hand, a crazed sky overhead. “I don’t believe you,” he said, though it was not disbelief he was talking about, not that so much as his disinclination to share her pain.

  “It’s gone on too long,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

  When he withdrew his hand, she asked if he was planning to leave her there.

  “Why don’t you try to get up?”

  “Why don’t you go and get some help? I’m not going to be able to walk.”

  “You want me to go or you don’t?”

  “I’m putting myself in your hands,” she said.

  Terman squatted next to her, the posture precarious. “Let me look at the ankle,” he said. It was swollen slightly and would swell more. He didn’t know what he was looking for, what significances, and was aggrieved at the ankle for being in complicity with its owner. “You can lean your weight on me,” he said. “We can get back to the house that way.” It was beginning to rain delicately.

  “I think I’m too big for you,” she said. “Do you know how much I weigh?”

  “It’s a matter of public record,” he said.