Flight of Brothers

by Jonathan Baumbach

  She seemed to be thinking about my question. “I can’t be more explicit than that. You’ll just have to accept my word for it. Or not.”

  “My dreams are prescient,” I said. “At least some of them are.” I didn’t say that sometimes I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s dreams. Or where one begins and the other ends.

  “Some people think that’s crazy,” I said, laughing at the severity of my comment.

  She glanced behind her briefly. “You can’t help what people think,” she said.

  “That’s a good way to look at it,” I said. At that moment I realized there was something a little off about her, not quite crazy, but not far from crazy either. Were we kindred spirits? Perhaps that was just another way of looking at our odd relationship.

  Three weeks had passed since the detectives’ visit and they had not returned, but I expected them daily, waited for them, had two extra cups of coffee brewed in my pot in case they showed up. I also read the paper every day for news of the murder case. For a while there had been a suspect and a reported arrest, but there had been no follow up. I still imagined some version of the police lineup that had been nagging at my dreams awaited me.

  “In my opinion,” Klotzman said, when the topic came up in one of our sessions, “you’re not likely to hear from them again.”

  The ‘not likely’ disturbed me. “You’re saying it’s not absolutely certain,” I said, “which plays into my fantasies.”

  “I’m fairly certain,” he said. “If they were interested in you, they wouldn’t have waited this long.”

  “What if they’re just trying to catch me off my guard,” I said.

  “So you’re staying on your guard just in case,” he said. “And what good does that do you?”

  “This way they can’t take me by surprise,” I said.

  “And what would happen if these machievellians took you by surprise?” he asked.

  He always had a comeback, always had the last word. Later, at home, I was full of answers, most of them built on the case that I had something to hide.

  I had a dream in which the police lineup was made up of five men who looked like Dr. Klotzman. I woke relieved, thinking maybe Klotzman was on to something, but with the equivalent of a smile on my face, even though I almost never smiled.

  My mother called and hectored me about getting out more. How could she know how little I got out unless she had spies or long distance binoculars. I assured her I was taking lots of walks with my neighbor, Eva, exaggerating the amount, but she went right on as if I hadn’t said a thing. This went on for about an hour. There were other complaints about my not eating well, about which she had even less information. She threatened to come over and cook for me but I managed to talk her out of that one. “And how are you?” I asked her. “Lonely,” she said. There was probably more going on in my life than in hers.

  When alone I was concerned what to do with myself, was considering setting up another regular appointment with Klotzman or having an affair with Eva, Eva willing, both ideas rejected almost out of hand. Spending more time in bed seemed a possible solution, but only if I could sleep. Lying sleepless barely passed the time. Maybe I should give up on the novel I was having so much trouble writing and start another one. I made a note to myself to consider the prospect.

  Much of what I do has to do with planning what to do next so I never find myself with nothing to do while in fact I never have anything to do.

  I mentioned this excessive planning to Klotzman. “I like to know what’s coming up,” I said.

  “You want to avoid surprise,” he said. “You mentioned that before in conjunction with the detectives.”

  “Yes. At the same time when I know what’s coming up, I lose interest in it. Still, that’s better than being taking by surprise or having nothing ahead of me.”

  “I’m not sure, Mel, I know what you mean by nothing,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure either. “Nothing to do,” I said. “No activity. Sometimes I write in my note book: ‘watch TV tonight at nine.’”

  “Not a particular program? Just call on yourself to watch?”

  “And sometimes, not always, I don’t even bother turning the set on.”

  “That I don’t understand,” Klotzman said. “Why don’t you turn the set on if you’ve instructed yourself to.”

  I thought about it, but had no answer. “I don’t know. I don’t really like television, but that’s not the reason.”

  “What did you do instead of watching television?”

  “Different things,” I said. “Most recently, I just went to bed.”

  “You discovered you were tired?” he asked in his skeptical way.

  “I guess. No. I just wanted to lose consciousness.”

  He nodded in his annoying way. He liked to demonstrate that he was a step ahead of me, knew what I was going to say before it was actually said. If I didn’t want to surprise myself, I would have been elated to surprise Klotzman.

  I’m not very good at noticing the details of my surroundings, but in the middle of one of my sessions, I noted that Klotzman had refurnished his office. The way it came to me was that I felt less at home in my familiar surroundings then I had and one thing led to another and the reason eventually revealed itself. There was a new carpet somewhat lighter or perhaps darker than the old and the furniture had been replaced by furniture not much different than its predecessor.

  I stopped whatever else I was going to say and mentioned my observation.

  “The place was getting pretty tacky,” he said. “It needed to be spruced up, I felt. What do you think?”

  I didn’t want to be too negative. “I suppose I’ll get used to it.”

  “Change creates movement,” he said, “new ways of seeing. It’ll be good for you. You’ll see.”

  I accepted his point, not knowing what else to do with it. As it turned out, we had a fairly lively session and perhaps my uneasiness with the altered environment had something to do with it.

  When I got back to my apartment, I looked over my furnishings, which had been tacky for a long time. and it seemed to me a possibly useful project to refurnish my living quarters, perhaps one room at a time. I didn’t much like the idea of poking around in shops and wondered if it could be done through the mails or by phone. The faded red couch in my living room had two broken springs so that needed to be replaced first.

  I didn’t want to mention my project to Klotzman because I didn’t want him to think that I was following his example. So I did nothing about it until one day I thought of asking Eva for advice.

  “You could go to a department store,” she said.

  I shook my head. The idea didn’t attract me. We were taking one of our periodic walks. “I’m uncomfortable with salesman.”

  “You can always say you’re just looking. That you don’t want to be bothered. If it were me, if I were looking for something, I’d do it on the computer over the internet.”

  The longer I lived with the faded red couch the more of an eyesore it seemed. I could just throw it out and not replace it or replace it eventually. I only sat on it these days when I was particularly miserable.

  A week later Eva asked me if I had gotten a new couch and I said evasively that I was working on it.

  I sat on the old couch a few more times to see if it was as uncomfortable as I remembered it. It didn’t seem so bad. It owned its spot in the room. Perhaps I was resisting change.

  Eva told me she was seeing Ron again but not as regularly as before. She liked him better, she allowed, when she saw him less. Still it was hard to repeat old patterns.

  Easier, I thought, than creating new ones.

  The first thing I purchased on the internet was a pair of white socks—no reason not to start small—and when they arrived in the mail it was like getting a gift, one I had no obligation to reciprocate. Why hadn’t I done this before? Of course this didn’t solve the immediate problem. The next thing I ordered was a pair of pa
nts, but they were disappointing. The danger of course was getting the wrong thing or not quite the right thing. If I got a sofa I didn’t like, it would not be so easy to dispose of it. The pants I merely put away in a drawer, thinking that when I took them out again they would be a better fit than they were. In the mean time I pursued the subtle and inconspicuous course of wooing Eva without her knowing it.

  “What days do you see Ron?” I asked her on one of our walks.

  “Wednesday and Saturday,” she said, “but I’m thinking of cutting it back to just Saturday.”

  I nodded, as if, like Klotzman, it was something I knew all along.

  “I want to keep my options open,” she said.

  “I approve,” I said, and she smiled.

  I smiled inwardly in return, giving nothing away.

  “If you like,” she said, “I’ll go to a store with you and help you pick out a sofa.”

  “I appreciate the offer,” I said, “though I’m not quite ready. One of these days.”

  “Are you backtracking? Maybe you’re still attached to the old one. You tell me when you’re ready, Mel.”

  “I’m ready and not ready,” I said. “I feel an obligation to the way things were and at the same time in my head I’m prepared for change.”

  The next morning I dragged the eyesore sofa four or five inches closer to thedoor in readiness for disposal. I checked out sofas on the internet and some came with pictures that were probably not very accurate. If you bought one of these sofas, the company offered to take the old one away at no extra cost.

  For a while, for a long time it seemed, my project was stuck in the rut of indecision. Then one day, trying some obscure merchant on the internet I saw a sofa that greatly resembled the one I wanted to discard. I had, which is rare for me, a kind of epiphany. This was the one I needed to order. Afterward I could pretend, if necessary, that it was the old sofa restored to its former well being. I ordered it without letting myself think about it and so risk changing my mind.

  I worried that the picture of it might have been misleading but ten days later when the new sofa arrived and the old eyesore was taken away it was hard to tell the difference. I didn’t sit on it for a few days, wanting to keep it pristine, but sat across from it and watched it breathe. This was change, I decided, but not disruptive change, induced movement at a pace I was ready for.

  I was happy for a few days, perhaps a day and a half, after the new sofa entered my life. There had always been papers and books on the old sofa so the new one, the resurrected old one, seemed relatively naked. I took some books off my shelf and put them on the sofa though that didn’t produce quite the effect I had been looking for. I began to miss the old guy as if it were a living thing, a pet perhaps, who had died. I felt in some way I had betrayed the old one with the new which tarnished my initial pleasure in its presence.

  I didn’t tell Klotzman about the new sofa but asked him if he missed his old furniture.

  “Absolutely not,” he said.

  “Don’t you feel you’ve betrayed the furniture that had been with you, served you well, for so long?”

  “Please,” he said. “It’s inanimate. It has no feelings. Why are you so concerned? Have you thrown some old furniture out?”

  And so I confessed. I let Klotzman talk me out of my obsession with the old couch. “It’s displaced feelings,” he said. “We’ve been through this before.”

  At least he didn’t see my getting a new couch a following of his example. I’ll give him that.

  Inanimate or not, I couldn’t get over the idea that in some way I had hurt the old couch’s feelings, which I had never meant to do. It wasn’t my fault the old couch had gotten run down. I might have treated it better when it was in its prime.

  My life was changing in small ways. I went to the movies for the first time with Eva. There was a time not so long ago I liked to go by myself and sit in the dark sometimes for hours, but I stopped doing that and so stopped going to movies altogether.

  One time when we were walking, Eva said there was a movie opening that she’d like to see. She described the movie from some review but I was only half listening. “It’s about a man and a woman who spend a lot of time together, mistreating each other,” she said. “They mistreat each other because it’s the only way either of them knows to express feelings.”

  “Well, why don’t they stop seeing each other?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose we’ll have to see the movie to find out.”

  So out of this barely coherent conversation, I agreed to go to the movie with her.

  Was this a date? I wasn’t sure. I thought of taking her hand, but didn’t. I was more aware of her presence next to me than the action on the screen. Or to put it another way her presence distracted me from the movie at least for awhile. I felt I was in an ocean liner on a black sea sailing awkwardly toward the screen, though not getting any closer. I forgot how long movies are. This one seemed to go on forever, slowly, relentlessly. I thought of going to the bathroom for a respite or going to the popcorn counter for something to eat—not popcorn—but I didn’t dare to move. All this time, Eva’s focus never left the screen or such was the impression of the agitated bystander next to her.

  And then for some reason only its own it was over and the audience began to shuffle toward the exit.

  “What did you think?” Eva asked me.

  I couldn’t begin to say. “What did you think?” I asked her back.

  “I understood by the end why they stayed together through all their misery.”

  “The director required them to,” I said.

  We were outside the theater now. She looked at me before breaking into a laugh. “I didn’t know you were so funny,” she said. “You did mean that as a joke, didn’t you?” I didn’t answer. “They stayed together because the only way they could express their love for each other was by treating the loved one miserably.”

  “Displaced behavior,” I said.

  “Yes. Extreme displaced behavior,” she said. “Thanks for going with me.”

  “Like treating an inanimate object as if it were human,” I said to add to the dialogue.

  “Not like that,” she said. “It was extreme but realistic. People are afraid to express tender feelings. You have to educate yourself to express love. I think that’s what the movie was saying.”

  The movie had put me in an odd contrarian mood. “Well, we all sort of knew that before the movie began.”

  “So you didn’t like it. I’m sorry. Should we take a cab back?”

  I could see she was getting upset with me. “I did. I did like it, as a matter of fact.” I struggled for something else to say that was positive. “It had interesting camera angles… Why don’t we walk back?”

  “It’s a long walk, Mel,” she said. “Longer than any of the walks we usually take. Let’s start off on foot and if one of us gets tired, we can call a cab.”

  So we started off at a determined pace. After four blocks I was tired, but I wasn’t going to give in. We were getting to be like an old married couple, intimate yet distant. I could hear myself saying something of the sort to Klotzman.

  Our topic for discussion was the movie, which we moved around between us and when that was gone we fell into a protracted silence. While we talked it was though I was seeing the movie for the first time. It was all much clearer in the light of day.

  “Ron doesn’t like most movies,” she said out of the blue. “I don’t like to go alone so it was good of you to keep me company.”

  Again I was being pigeonholed as Ron’s stand-in, which I didn’t know that I liked, which I knew I didn’t like.

  When at long last, angry at having walked so far, we got to her door, caught up in the spell of the movie—my excuse to myself—I grabbed at her as she was unlatching her door and kissed her roughly, surprising us both.

  She pulled away. “You hurt me,” she said. In an instant I returned to my old stiff self and moved like a sha
dow to my own apartment.

  Ten minutes later she knocked at my door. I was only slightly surprised to see her there. “I didn’t mean to chase you away,” she said.

  “I was out of control,” I said.

  She was looking at something over my shoulder. “Is that a new couch?” she asked.

  “You can tell,” I said. “It looks just like the old one, doesn’t it?”

  “It looks altogether different,” she said. “Could I sit on it?”

  It was the first time she had been in my apartment—a lot of firsts today—and we sat, slightly apart I should add, on my new couch. Then since I wasn’t moving she leaned over and kissed me gently on the lips. And so we necked for awhile like teenagers and though I had a fierce erection, threatening to tear me from the couch, I did nothing to further its cause. After awhile, she asked me if there was anything to eat. I got up, knowing there was nothing, and looked around before making my report.

  “That was nice,” she said, and kissed me goodbye before returning to her own apartment.

  I reported much of this to Klotzman at our next session.

  “Tell me again why you didn’t go to bed with her,” he said

  “I can’t explain it,” I said. “In some way I wasn’t ready to. I think I didn’t want to get involved.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Mel. Listen to yourself. You are already involved. Was there something about having sex with her that frightened you?”

  I jumped at the excuse he had offered me and nodded abjectly.

  “What frightened you? Do you know?”

  “If I knew,” I said, “you would be the first one I’d share it with. Let’s move on to something else, okay? I had another police lineup dream.”

  “I think this is important, Mel. Think about it. What might have frightened you?”

  “I was already sorry about the kissing part, innocent as it was. I didn’t want things to go any further. I don’t think I really trusted her. She was a neighbor and a relative stranger. I was afraid of where it might lead.” Whatever I said, none of it sounded real.

  “You’re talking in circles,” Klotzman said “You didn’t trust her, to do what I might add, because you didn’t trust her. Where might the kissing lead?”