A Man to Conjure With

by Jonathan Baumbach

  Two of his tires were mysteriously low when he got back to the cab, the kids nowhere in sight, though he thought he heard laughing from the next house. He shook his fist at the street, secretly amused. For hours, through most of his benighted, unsuccessful day, Delilah’s ageless child face haunted him. Love? He was in love with Lois. (And Gloria.) He had enough troubles.

  That night he told Lois about his new job, about having been out of work, a wholesale clearance of conscience.

  “Do you think that makes any difference?” she said wearily.

  His answer was to call her mother and begrudgingly apologize, which she grudgingly accepted, changing nothing.

  “Is there anything I can do to change your mind?” he asked Lois, who was sweeping the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  So he said nothing. He bided his time with the nervous patience of urgency.

  An hour passed without an argument. Reading the afternoon paper, Peter fell asleep in his chair.

  He was necking with an older woman (it seemed) in the back seat of another cab. Then all of a sudden Lois was there looking on.

  “So that’s what you are,” Lois said. “I should have known.”

  He freed himself from the woman’s hold. “It’s not what you think, Lois. You see, she was sick and I was trying …”

  “He took me unawares, the dear,” the woman said.

  “You revolt me,” Lois said to him, her voice like an icy wind. “God, what a fool you are! So, you married me to get at my mother. You deserve each other.” She opened a door, the cab stuttering to a stop.

  “Your mother?” He was innocent of that at least. “That’s not your mother, Lois. Look at her.” The woman, wearing a black veil, laughed unpleasantly.

  “I promise you’ll never see me again,” Lois said. She bolted from the car, running toward an enormous building at the end of the street. In love, he ran after her. A cab turning the corner—Peter yelled for it to stop—knocked her down. When he got to her she was already decomposing, her ashes floating away in the wind.

  “Lois …”

  He awoke with a shock. “Lois?” She wasn’t in the room. He looked in the kitchen, the bathroom, calling, tired as hell, “Lois, where are you, honey? Lois. Lois. Lois.” (Her coat was gone from the closet.)

  He sighed and sat down on the bed. A man who would have such dreams, he decided, deserved the worst.

  Before he had time to worry about her absence, she was back, humming to herself. “It’s not bad out, old Peter. It’s very warm,” she said, kissing him on the cheek, sitting down next to him. “And how are you?”

  “I had a bad dream,” he said. He put his head in her lap, her tweed skirt smelling of cold streets.

  “I have an idea,” she said, stroking his face, “that maybe it will abort by itself. Miscarriages, you know, are very common in the early months of pregnancy. And if I help it along … Anyway, I’ve been feeling much better about it.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Do you love me?” she asked wistfully.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you mind my asking?” she said, as if he had a choice. “It’s important for me to know. Not that I always believe you tell me the truth, but I can tell when you’re lying.” She stroked his hair. “My problem is that sometimes I think I love you and sometimes I think I don’t. Is that how it is with you?”

  His mouth was dry. “I said I loved you.”

  “All the time?” she wanted to know, an important distinction. He could feel the springs of her nerves wind tight, her spirit on guard against him.

  “I love you only when you love me,” he said, half a joke, more truth than he meant.

  She thought about it. “That’s why I think we shouldn’t have this child,” she said. “We don’t love each other enough.”

  As though it were an enormous weight, he lifted his head from her lap. “Do you really think that there are people in this world who love each other all the time?”

  “Now you’re twisting my words. I think that people who love each other—really love each other—love each other all the time, more or less.”

  As he watched her, she seemed to be moving farther and farther away from him, though in fact they were only a few inches apart on the bed, her eyes lost in the darkness of some obscure interior voyage. “Well,” he said, “don’t you think that we’re in that category, more or less?”

  Her eyes returned, angry, strange. “I don’t love you when you’re like that.”

  “Like what?” He thought of putting his arm around her but didn’t, wary of her mood.

  “I hate you when you mock me,” she said. She was lying on her back now, her hands cradling her head, staring at the ceiling. “People who are in love don’t always argue,” she said.

  He didn’t want to argue the point. “Okay,” he said, admiring her, flat-chested, bony, her face scarred with shadows—his enemy—in love with her.

  “Okay what?”

  “I was agreeing with you.”

  She shaded her eyes to look at him. “You’re a clown,” she said, not without affection.

  Always ready to oblige, he made a clownish face, which she pretended to ignore—some part of her, some distant part, amused.

  Watching her, he tried to recall what his life had been like before Lois, in the days of his youth, the happiest days of his life; he could hardly remember. A few girls came to mind, a few faces without names, a few names without faces. In his memory, all were gentle, beautiful, in love with him. What had he given up? What he had never had he had lost. He remembered hawking ice cream at Coney Island with Herbie, running from the cops, just barely getting away, once he had been caught. All his memories were of flight. Still, he was his own man (or boy) then, without all this emotional touching which he couldn’t bear, which he couldn’t do without.

  “Should I tell you what you were thinking?” she said, a face reader, a child’s canny smile lighting her sallow face.

  “I wasn’t thinking of anything,” he said, pushing back his hair as though he were about to have his picture taken.

  “You were thinking,” she said, staring at the bilious walls, “that you had trapped yourself by marrying me.” She glanced up at him slyly, testing his response.

  He couldn’t deny it, though it wasn’t the whole truth. “What would I do without you?” he protested.

  A laugh. “What would you do with me?” she asked.

  She had him there. His answer: he kissed the back of her neck, the wisp-ridden down of hair that guarded the dark hollow of her back. She tolerated him. “I have to write a paper for school,” she said. “Don’t you have anything to do?”

  He sulked.

  She kissed him. “You’re so vulnerable,” she said, “that’s why I like you.”

  He looked at Lois, her childish face, through the dark prism of his vision, just out of focus, and was reminded suddenly of Delilah, unable at the moment to distinguish one from the other. Was it in some way the same face, or the obscure and deliberate deception of his memory? He took Lois’s hand, which fitted into his fingers like a glove, a size too small.

  “Poor Peter,” she said, “stuck with me.”

  The room seemed airless, unbearably hot. “Is it all right if I open a window?” he asked, anticipating her answer.

  “It’s freezing in here,” she said, extricating her hand to embrace herself. He was sweating from the heat.

  While Lois typed—the tremors of her back marking her progress—Peter remained on the bed, sweating, trying to think of something to say that might ease the tension between them. Before long, as a matter of course, he was asleep. He lurched from the curb, the cab under him, starting in a rush, swerving, slamming to an abrupt stop, people flooding the streets, blocking his way. Impatient, he knocked over an old man and a boy who had crossed against the light. No one noticed except his passenger, who said, “What are you going to make of yourself, boob?”

  They were always a
sking him that or some other unanswerable question. “Never ask an author about his own work,” he said, pleased with the answer. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

  “Move over,” she said. “You’re hogging the bed.”

  It didn’t make any sense, but since it was a policy of the company that the passenger was generally right, he moved under protest, an inaudible grumble.

  “You sleep more than you’re awake,” she said.

  “It’s a tiring job,” he said, and went back to work.

  | 5 |

  “This is the kind of job,” Herbie had advised him, “where you can make as much money as you want. A hundred, a hundred fifty a week with no sweat.”

  Peter made forty dollars his first week.

  “I swear to God,” Herbie was saying, “in my whole life I’ve never met anyone who was as incompetent at everything. I worry about you.”

  They were in Herbie’s apartment, Peter’s cab parked in a one-hour zone down the street. Nostalgic about Gloria, Peter had drifted into the habit of visiting his brother in the morning. A coffee break—one of the benefits of industrial enlightenment—it broke up the day, though actually he rarely started work now until after his visit with Herbie.

  “Next week I’ll make a hundred fifty,” Peter boasted—a matter of pride.

  “Yeah?” Herbie said. “Do it! Then I’ll believe you. I tell you what: I’ll give you twenty to fifteen you don’t make over a hundred ten. What do you say?”

  “It’s a bet,” Peter said, lumbering off the Goodwill sofa which, broken-springed, helped him along. “I’d better get going,” he said, putting on his cap with professional grace. The hat, two sizes too large, had a way of descending over his ears.

  “What’s your rush?” Herbie complained. “Have another cup of coffee, for God’s sake. You don’t make any money anyway.”

  “I’ve had three cups of coffee already,” he said, lethargic after his initial burst of energy. “And I’ll get a ticket if I don’t move the cab. You don’t want me to lose my bet, do you?”

  “So who’s keeping you?” Herbie said. “Sucker, if I lose that bet, I’ll give up gambling.”

  Peter was halfway out the door when Herbie called him back. “Did you call the doctor’s number I gave you?” he said, pointing a finger of accusation.

  “I don’t have time to talk now,” Peter said. “Can’t make any money standing around talking, can I?”

  “Good-bye,” Herbie barked. “See you some time. Jerk! You need a kid now like you need a second dick. Listen to me. Call Dr. Henderson. Where are you running to? You’re always running off somewhere.”

  Going down the stairs in a hurry, he ran into Gloria coming up, a look of fierce determination on her face. She passed him, brushing against his shoulder, with barely a nod.

  “Gloria …”

  “Peter?” She came back down the stairs. “You look different for some reason.”

  “How have you been?” he wanted to know.

  She looked over her shoulder, impatient to be off, squeezed his arm, smiled wanly, and was off. “Can’t talk. See ya.”

  He waved to the shadows of her moving form, her ass the last to leave the bedroom of his vision. Her heavy perfume lingered, her touch on his arm fanned the full-blown bellows of his desire, an erection for his troubles. He hoped no one was watching.

  It struck him as he started up the cab that as far as he understood his own desires, he was at the moment infatuated with three women. And horny, ascetic, deprived, your workaday cab driver with a map of the city in his back pocket, and expectant which is to say hopelessly (hopefully) anxious, which was the worst of it.

  After a while, as Peter became more or less adept at his job, rarely getting lost any more, he began to wonder if it was worth it. Working four full days and two nights, all day Saturday, he hardly saw his wife (and the implications of his child). And worst of all, Lois acted as if she didn’t mind, seemed actually to like the idea of his being away. Had Lois missed him more, or appeared to miss him more, he could have afforded to miss her less. An economist’s paradox: he was almost never around, yet in greater supply than demand. He tried not to worry about it, which was a joke on himself. It was not in him not to worry. Ever since his long day in bed with Gloria, his secretive (innocent?) meetings with Delilah, he had become morbidly suspicious of Lois. He knew, on the evidence of his instincts, that she had a lover. One, maybe two. At the same time he knew of course that his suspicions were madness, but though he refused to believe in them, they preyed on him, took advantage of his good nature. On occasion, driving through midtown Manhattan, he actually saw, thought he saw, in the shadowy windows of a fashionable restaurant, Lois and a man (older, fairer, richer) having cocktails together, though of course there were many girls with long black hair in New York having drinks with other men—Peter being tied down to his cab. Ahhh! A recurrent preoccupation, an inspired obsession, it helped pass the time.

  So, among other things, over all things, he worried about Lois. He also longed, lusted, to see Gloria again, which he sublimated in erotic fantasies. The cab driver-lover! It helped pass the time. And he did see Delilah. Every day in fact (except Friday, his day off) he saw Delilah, a business arrangement which offered more guilt than pleasure. He would pick her up in front of the High School of Performing Arts at about two-thirty, and circuitously, sometimes touring Central Park at her request, drive her home, parking around the corner from her house, the transaction apparently a secret between them. And she paid for the ride, including a 25-cent tip, which somehow continued to surprise him. His sense of loss the measure of his feelings, he discovered himself in love with Delilah the one day she didn’t show up for their appointment. He had waited an hour, cruising around the block, searching other faces for signs of her before he gave up. And leaving without her, he was heavy-hearted, convinced that he would never see her again—all his losses in the mourning of possibility, it seemed, one endless loss. The next day, of course, she was there as before.

  “Where were you yesterday?” she asked as soon as they had taken off.

  “Where was I? Where were you?”

  “Don’t try to worm your way out of it,” she said, heckling him with her solemnity. “The undeniable fact remains that you didn’t pick me up yesterday.”

  “Okay,” he said, concentrating on ignoring her. He had to slam on his brakes to keep from hitting two women who were crossing against the light.

  “Well, where were you?” she said.

  He maneuvered his way brilliantly through the narrow space between two sedentary trucks which, in the moment of his triumph, like crocodiles posing as logs suddenly came to life, flanking him. Caught helplessly in the middle, Peter waited for the trucks to ease past him, sweating his fear, honking his horn in frustrated protest.

  “You’re not only the most dangerous cab driver I know,” Delilah said in her elocution-class voice, “you’re also the most impolite. As your employer, I think I have a right to know where you were. Well?”

  “I was at your school at two-thirty, as you well know.”

  “How do I know that?” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “That’s because you weren’t there,” he said. “I waited—”

  “The fact remains,” she interrupted, “that I waited for you and waited for you and you didn’t show up.”

  “It won’t happen again,” he said, making a wrong turn. The persistence of her kidding, if that’s what it was, had a way of disconcerting him, as though something real were at stake.

  “It doesn’t matter whether it does or not,” she said. “You’re already a disappointment.” Catching his eye in the mirror, she stuck out her tongue, pointing it at him like a weapon.

  Absorbed in watching her, he barely avoided smashing into another cab.

  A savage head leaned out the window. “What’s a matter, you some kind of nut? Schmuck!” It was Sclaratti. Peter averted his face, drove on without acknowledgment.

  �
�What’s a matter, you some kind of nut?” Delilah said—a perfect imitation—and laughed furiously.

  “You see what happens when you distract the driver,” he said pompously, running a red light.

  “What you think, I also some kind of nut?” she said, and she laughed convulsively, hiccupping after a while, as if it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

  “Take me to the park,” she ordered. “I want to see how the other half lives.” He drove her directly home, parking, turning off the meter.

  Furious, she remained in the back seat, her hands crossed in front of her, refusing to move.

  “Last stop,” he said.

  She pursed her mouth as though she had eaten something disagreeable. “I thought you were my friend,” she said piteously.

  “Your friend has brought you home,” he said. “I’m not going.”

  “What’s a matter, you some kind of nut?” he said.

  She honored him with a bored smile. “You’re all right for a cab driver,” she said, paying him his fare, not quite looking at him.

  Languid, taking her time, she emerged a perfect butterfly from the sanctuary of the cab, collected, full of herself. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

  He was ready to leave, the best part of his day over, when her face appeared at his window. “Hello,” he said a bit foolishly, unrolling the glass. “What have we here?”

  “Driver,” she said solemnly, “don’t ever not show up again.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Or I’ll lose my faith in you.”

  She was gone before he could think of anything to say. What did it all mean? asked an anxious voice in his skull. The answer begging the question came from his chest: It means. What then? Ah, but Peter Becker, dreamer and hack driver, had secrets, self-surprises, he kept hidden even from himself.

  In the evening, sweat-ridden, his dust-stained white shirt now flesh of his flesh, Peter returned home, guilty of unknown sins, to a wife he suspected of betraying him. A jealous man looks for signs and finds substantiations. In the day’s collected dust of their apartment, among the puffed-up worms of shadow, the hastily made bed, Peter saw too much; he regretted his knowledge.