What Comes Next

by Jonathan Baumbach

  I left. My name being called as I went out, following me down the stairs. “Christopher. Christopher. Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go without me.”

  SEVEN

  In Spring the War Got Worse

  HE TOLD HER on a dreary Saturday morning in May—it was drizzling, the dark sky scarred with streaks of red as if something were burning on the other side of the world—that it would have to end between them. They had been walking in the park.

  She nodded, said in a mild voice, looking at her shoes, that she thought she understood. Shrugging it off.

  Her casualness not what he expected, he felt compelled to explain. “As you know, I’ve been under great pressure”—the words coming out as if he had dreamed them—“the war, my book which has to be done by September, the guilt I feel about us. Seeing you, I can’t seem to get anything done. The guilt paralyzes me.”

  “It’s all right, Curt,” she said, angry at him for trying to provoke a scene. “It’s been hard on me, too.”

  “You know I loved you,” he said.

  “Past tense?”

  “Love you. You know that.”

  “I know,” she said, glancing at him coolly. “Good-bye, Curt.” Holding out her hand for him to shake.

  “I thought we would have lunch in the park,” he said, wanting, now that its end was decided—how terrifyingly final endings were—to keep things alive a little longer. Wanting also (not to lose in memory what was) to make love to her one more time. The memory of her flamed in him.

  They walked slowly through the park, coming to the south boundary of the reservoir, saw a man rubbing himself up against a tree, and turned to return. He sensed that she was crying, her head down, but when he looked saw that her eyes, which were very large and deep brown, were dry.

  He said good-bye at the door, refusing her invitation to come in—the aunt listening to Berlioz inside.

  She started to say something, kept him waiting, her face swollen with words, dark. “Curt,” she said in that barely audible voice that always had the effect of making him lean toward her, “I want you to know I’ll be here if you want me.”

  Grateful, he crushed her in his arms, pressed himself swollen against her. They kissed twice briefly and she was gone. He carried with him down the steps and into the street, driving home to Brooklyn, a nervous sense of virtue like a thief in a movie he had once seen, a British comedy, who had sneaked into a bank at night to return the money he had stolen.

  He had few regrets. Few regrets but fewer pleasures, surfeited by pride, hungry. He had the idea that the energy he had spent in making love to Rosemary—stored up since no longer in use—could be put into his book. Ascetic in his private life, he wrote intensely, passionately for a few days and felt, counting the pages he had done, a sense of accomplishment like a lover tilting a woman over the edge. Reading over what he had written, he was disappointed. Though he wanted to love it, had felt love in the writing, it was merely competent, unworthy of his passion. Words. Sentences. They died as they formed themselves. He had never felt so dry.

  And though he denied himself, the war didn’t end. His obsession had been madness. The day before his split with Rosemary the President had suspended bombing of the North, waiting for some gesture from the enemy, but then, not getting what he wanted, not clear what it was, he had redoubled the intensity of the raids. For which Curt, still writing the White House, though less often than before, felt in the soft walls of his stomach responsible. As part of a nationally organized protest, he went to Washington with twenty-five of his students—Christopher not among them—and got sick on the bus, dry-heaving by the side of the road. The afternoon spent in a Washington motel—the wallpaper patterned with American flags—listening to inaccurate reports of the rally on the radio.

  He worried that Rosemary was unhappy and, against his resolve to avoid all contact with her, called to see how she was. (“An untested resolve,” he wrote to himself, “is a paper tiger.”) It was hard to talk on the phone—her words without face—and he was tempted to suggest that they meet. She said she was all right, though sounded disconsolate. She was doing a lot of reading, she said, preparing for her finals. Reading at the moment for herself The Stranger by Camus. Did he know it? He said he did, though not well.

  The talk pained him. It was as if they had hardly known each other. Were ghosts of themselves. What had been, their love, a corpse strangled by the wires of the phone. He was struck by loss—an old terror. In four days they had fallen from intimates—in memory he had never not loved her—to bare acquaintainces, strangers.

  The next day, in his office, meaning to work on his book, distracted, he wrote Rosemary a poem. Not to her, about her, about his feelings. It was something he had not done in a long time—so long he couldn’t remember when last, but it was in him and came out.

  Strangers

  It is black Thursday.

  All day the windows reflect faces—

  my face, yours, night’s, yours,

  the face of last winter. I watch

  you under rows and rows

  of light, eating the fruit

  of my laborious words.

  My spirit like pits on your plate,

  unswallowed,

  when I notice your hair

  for no reason is on

  fire, lights pinned to it like an omen,

  your face stuffed with words and

  silent.

  I am dreaming silence.

  Behind me whispering

  like the ghosts of children

  (my arms stretched against a cross of

  memory)

  Your eyes.

  Done, what could he do with it but put it among his papers or destroy it (though he was a man who didn’t like destruction), frightened that such a creature had been, without his knowledge, inside him. He felt like a Pandora’s box, the lid barely open. Still, the writing of it—the release it gave him—kept him another day from seeking her out. Inspired, he tried a poem about the war—“Peasant, peasant, burning bright/ In the jungles of the night/ American napalm bring western light.” The next morning he burned them both, fascinated by the burning form in his wastebasket. His words.

  Though he couldn’t be absolutely sure—Christopher of late expert at staying out of sight—Parks had the sense he had given up following him. Since his blow-up at him a month ago, his student had, in his father’s words, “shaped up.” He had not been late again, not missed another class—their relationship increasingly businesslike and polite. Parks didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. When he thought about it, not being followed made him feel lonelier.

  If some of his burdens were gone, there was still the war, his book, teaching responsibilities, his wife and daughter, to occupy his time. His time, not his spirit. Carolyn trod lightly in the house, treated him as if there were a HANDLE WITH CARE sign on his back. They seemed, even at meals, even at night in the same bed, to be at least two rooms apart. Used to it, his scar tissue of no use without it, he missed her bitchery. Preferable to her cautious silence—or was it merely polite disinterest that in his vanity he took for fear of him? He suspected that she was storing up her weapons to use when he was at lowest ebb, his guard down, in an all-out assault. No survivors. No prisoners. Though he disliked things out of his control, if she wanted her freedom the prerogative was hers. He would take her denial of him like a man. He was, his father had told him often enough, a gentleman and not to forget it. It was in the blood, tainted some by his mother’s family. And gentleman though he had been born, resolute in his sense of honor, he missed Rosemary, damned to hell the vain fool who gave her up. Decided at whatever the cost to ask her to take him back. He anticipated, which was what he had earned, a brush-off, rejection. Forever denied her, he suffered love lost. Saw himself rejected Curtis Parks, former lover, pacifist, WASP, man of destiny, and, despite who he was, sufferer.

  She said that she would like to see him. Outwardly cool, his thinning blond hair flying, he was at her place
in twenty minutes. He came almost as soon as he entered her—anticipation all—and she held him locked between her legs for the rest, at peace, without desire herself. A disappointed man, his dissatisfaction apparently ineradicable, he told her how lonely he had been without her. She, too, she said, though he was not convinced. Felt pinched, old, unworthy of her prize, wanted to do something for her (sorry he hadn’t brought a gift), though didn’t know what. He suggested taking her to a movie—in the past they had rarely gone anywhere together—Curt, from his youth, a lover of bad movies. What if they were seen together? she asked. Hadn’t he wanted her to be circumspect? The hell with circumspection, he said, his life growing hard between her legs. “I want to take you to a movie sometime soon.” She clasped his back. They danced to it, a movie, a celebration. Sometime soon.

  Outside—the feeling of loss still with him (something lost)—he noticed Christopher standing circumspectly at the next corner. A sudden rage took him. The boy had no right to spy on his movements—what he did, right or wrong, his own affair. To set things straight between them—something he should have done from the beginning—he rushed after his shadow. As before, the student eluded him, vanishing—Curt too tired to pursue—into the maze of the park.

  Two hours later (his dinner barely swallowed), Curt, from a candy store two blocks away, phoned him at his home—a familiar voice answering. It would be better, he realized, to confront the student in person, but if he waited, he knew he would put it off again, his nature to avoid unpleasantness.

  “Christopher, I have something to say to you,” he started in, “and I don’t want you to interrupt until I’m done.”

  “To save us both embarrassment I’m afraid I’ll have to interrupt,” Christopher’s voice said. “Christopher isn’t home.”

  “Chris, this is Curt Parks.”

  “It’s nice that you’re curt parks, whatever that is. The fact is, my son isn’t here, and I have no information as to the probable time of his return, if ever.”

  “Mr. Steiner,” he said, still not convinced that it was the father, not the son, “would you tell Chris that Curt Parks called.” But somewhere along the way—the sound of his voice covering the click—the phone had died.

  If his father, the old man was a rude bastard. If the son, what the hell game was he playing with him now? In either case, Curt had been mistreated. He banged the side of his fist against the phone. What kind of man was this father, this scholar, who wouldn’t even be civil to a friend of his son, who wouldn’t even take a message? He couldn’t get over how similar the two voices were, father’s and son’s, how amazingly alike, which brought him back to the idea that they were the same voice. Out of curiosity, he thought to call again. Instead he dialed Rosemary’s number, and got the aunt, who in a barrage of words—a talker, this Imogen—said her niece was having dinner with someone whose name she didn’t know and would be back at any time. Rosemary (like Christopher) not where she ought to be, not home. The same true of Curt. So he returned to his family, the bosom of his respectable misery, to find both wife and daughter, though early, already asleep. People were running from him, deserting him. Who was she having dinner with, who?

  Maybe he used the wrong deodorant, or the wrong mouth-wash, or the wrong mouth. He lifted his shoe to see if he had stepped in something. There was nothing.

  A lonely, jealous man, he watched the late show on television—The Maltese Falcon (one of his all-time favorites)—and sipped bourbon. Somewhere along the way, wrestling the fat man for the blackbird, he became aware that the girl, if given the chance, would destroy him—the bird, no longer black, flying from his mouth. He watched it, nostalgic at its loss, ascend.

  She told him in her aunt’s living room—hard to talk to him (love easier)—of a curious thing that had happened to her. Curt, interested in essentials, listening to the unsaid. They had come back from Return from the Ashes, depressed as if the movie, its subject adultery, deception, and murder, had been a comment on their lives. Curt sensed that its abrasiveness had disturbed her—women tended to see everything in terms of themselves—and that she was angry at him because the man in the movie to whom he corresponded was indecent. Rosemary talking about walking home from a poetry-writing class she was taking at night. A car of boys, college-looking types, calling her over at the entrance to the park. While the driver asked her directions to someplace, one of the boys in the back had leaned forward and squirted shaving cream in her face.

  “You shouldn’t walk in the park alone at night,” he said. “You know that, Rosemary. And why did you talk to a group of strangers like that?”

  She had never wholly gotten over the feeling that he was still her teacher—he was always, unasked, giving instruction.

  “They looked all right,” she said, feeling the need to defend herself. “And it was only nine o’clock. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “What if they dragged you inside the car?”

  “Oh, Curt. All they did was get my face wet and frighten me and stain my coat a little.”

  “What if they had dragged you inside the car?”

  “Then I would have been in the car with them.” She made a face.

  Charmed despite his exasperation, in love with her. “I worry about you,” he said. “Please don’t take any unnecessary chances, baby. All kinds of madness goes on in New York because everything’s so impersonal. Human life isn’t worth much….” He stopped, bored with himself. “You know what I mean.”

  Her face dark, her eyes as in his poem. “I know. You’re always telling me,” she said softly. “I can take care of myself.” She kissed his face. “Don’t you believe I can take care of myself?”

  “I worry about you,” he said, still vaguely disturbed, the source out of focus, worried that he had bored her with his nagging (what an old woman he had become!), that she was tired of him.

  His response, his missing of the point, numbed her against him. She couldn’t tell him the simplest thing without his making something else—something that satisfied some theory of his—out of it. It was as if he had blamed her for the incident, or was disappointed that it hadn’t been worse. Why the boys had done what they had done, and why to her, had not concerned him at all. When he tried to kiss her she turned her head away. He had taken too much from her already, preferred others to her, was no comfort.

  “Do you have another man?” he asked.

  She left the room, then came back, and when he said he loved her she forgave him, though her heart was sore. “You don’t love me,” she said to herself, though pretended to be pleased with him. “You have no reason to be jealous,” she said.

  Her saying it providing reason. He felt old, in the way of her happiness, unworthy. The tension wouldn’t go away. He looked, sneaked a look at his watch, caught in the act.

  “You can go if you want to. Don’t stay on my account.”

  “On whose account should I stay?” He wrestled her down on the couch, Rosemary unresisting. “I’d like to squirt some shaving cream in your face.”

  She said, sticking out her tongue, that she didn’t think it was funny. Giggling. They swapped tongues, kissed. Still angry, fighting private wars, they went to bed.

  Curt woke, Rosemary against him, her hair playing against his face—he swatted at it as if it were a fly—at five-thirty, an hour later than he usually left.

  “The trouble with you,” she said when he was dressed and ready to go—the aunt in the living room like a dragon to be gotten past—“is that you don’t really believe you’re loved.”

  “I believe it now,” he said, kissing her throat, believing nothing. Worried about getting home.

  “Hello, Professor,” the aunt said—Professor her name for him. “I had no idea that you and Rosemary were here.”

  “Good night, Imogen,” he said, shaking her long-fingered hand, held out to him, palm down, as if to be kissed—the ceremony of their relationship.

  “Good night, Professor,” Rosemary called from her room.


  Though he didn’t see him—in too great a hurry to look around—Curt assumed that he was there, witnessing his movements. He was careful of his posture, kept his head erect, important to set a good example under duress. Rosemary in her room, the door closed, weeping. That she cried after he left, something she kept secret from him.

  Another secret she kept from him was that this dark boy, who may or may not have been a student of his, had been following her. She was sure of at least once. And had seen him other times staring from a distance like a hungry kid. His presence insisted on itself, though he had never spoken to her, never approached. Something about him reminded her of the priest in the movie Diary of a Country Priest, a figure she had fantasies about, though it was not physical resemblance. There was something doomed about him, something sad and terrible, and perhaps it was that, her sense of his vulnerability, that kept her from telling Curt. God knows, she had been followed before and could take care of herself, had of necessity over the years developed a variety of strategies for keeping men she didn’t want away. Her greatest protection had been her ability to appear, often when frantic, like ice. An ice statue, an old boyfriend had called her. A madonna carved out of ice. She had the idea that if she was good, God would come down from the sky and embrace her.

  EIGHT

  AN ESCAPED CONVICT wearing a white rubber mask is on the top of a small mountain, a man and two women his prisoners. Whenever anyone tries to get near him, he blasts them with a laser gun, which burns a hole in whatever it touches. There are ten or twelve already dead, decomposing on the side of the hill—among them an old math teacher, John Wayne, Fu Manchu, two former Presidents of the United States, and the secret identity of a famous comic book hero. I go up the mountain from the other side, ducking behind a tree when he turns to look. He sees me, beckons. “Come on, Christmas. Come on. I’ve been waiting for you.” Though he calls me as if he knows me, I stay behind the tree until he puts his gun down. While he’s looking the other way—he’s forgotten me—I crawl, hiding my face, toward the weapon. Grass gets up my nose, makes me want to sneeze. Ah-ah-aahh. I hold it back, the sneeze, my head swelling. The weapon getting closer. The dumb sonuvabitch has his back turned, is whistling some dumb criminal-class song. I dive on the weapon. He turns like a shot. The damn thing slips out from under me and, hitting a rock, goes off. The beam spears him in the neck, burns a hole beneath his chin the size of a half dollar. The poor bastard dances his pain. I close my eyes not to see. He hands me the mask. “Put it on,” he says. The voice a recording coming from the hole in his neck. “Put the mask on.” I say no. “Please,” he says. “Have I ever asked you for anything else?” When he dies I put it on. I untie his prisoners, but it makes no difference. They are all, no undemocratic exceptions, dead. A formation of soldiers coming up the hill. I wave to them that it’s all right. When they fire at me, I pick up the laser gun—what else can I do?—and hold them off. They fall, die—the bodies strewn across the field like trees ripped out of the earth. The soldiers revive, come after me. I turn my back, try to rip off the mask. It’s the dead man they want. The damn thing won’t come loose. It sticks like skin.