A Man to Conjure With

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “I hate you,” she whispered. She had to climb over him to get off the bed.

  He grabbed her, a thickness of blankets between them, held her.

  “Let me go, Peter.”

  And kissed her.

  “Why do you love me?” she said, sitting on his chest, studying his face. “The truth, tell me the truth.”

  At that moment it seemed to him she looked more like Delilah than … “I love you,” he said, “because you remind me of someone.”

  “What do you mean?” she said. “Who do I remind you of?” Her eyes turned angry, then, withdrawing into themselves, suspicious. “Do you have another girl somewhere?”

  The radiator was hissing madly, spitting its venom. A toilet flushed upstairs, and again—an encore by popular request. Lois was waiting, studying his face, for an answer. “You remind me,” he said, “of our child.”

  “What?” she said. Then, as if hearing his remark in the echo of her memory, she shook her head. The next moment she was in the kitchen. Peter remained in bed, wondering to himself. What did he mean by what he had said?

  He reasoned that Lois was suspicious of him mainly because she had something of her own to hide. The boy in the photograph. Or someone else? Who? When he thought of it, he was jealous of everyone—even of Dr. Henderson who, in the course of his examination, had in his medical way been intimate with her. Knew all her parts by their first name. And was it even his child—this fetus, this thing? When he shook his head to change his thoughts, his wife’s lovers, their ghosts, tumbled from his ear. A rustling sound like leaves. It was the radiator. It was the teakettle. It was raining outside.

  Lois called something from the kitchen which sounded like I sat in the hay.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “It’s Saturday,” she said, coming into the room tentatively, not to stay. “Why are you sending me off to school?”

  He didn’t know. She looked lovely in her pregnant blue bathrobe, her hair like a jungle. The lovelier she looked, the more jealous he got. He was.

  She came over and kissed him, tasting of salt and orange juice and mouth. “Do you have to work today, fat Peter?”

  He pulled in his gut. “Yah. But I don’t really have to go in until about three.”

  “Oh!” A lament of disappointment. At what? Did she think he wanted to go? Or was it that she was sorry he wasn’t going sooner? Her face drifted away from him as if a wind had blown across it. He closed his eyes and smelled from somewhere the smell of damp wool burning slightly. Was something on fire? he wondered. He sniffed again and it was gone.

  “Anyway, you’re much better than your brother,” she said unexpectedly.

  He opened one eye. “What’s the matter with Herbie?” “What isn’t?”

  He tested her: “Maybe I won’t go to work today,” he said.

  “We’ll do something.”

  “What will we do?” She sounded dubious.

  Something. He lolled in bed, a sleeping dog, while with cat pleasure she brushed her straight black hair, which extended, he noticed, he watched, to the edge of her butt.

  “Lois,” he called softly, the sound against his throat like the brush against her hair.

  Absorbed, her face like a ghost in the mirror, she continued to stroke her hair, dreamily, the rhythm quickening, the brush climbing down her hair, with pleasure, with great pleasure.

  “Lois.”

  “What?” She continued to brush—the voice, the acknowledgment, from somewhere else.

  “Lois.”

  “What do you want?” She stopped brushing.

  “You,” he said.

  “What for?” She smiled cannily. “I’ll make you breakfast as soon as I finish with my hair.”

  Her hair became leaves, became trees. He was walking in the country, Delilah with him, leading him by the hand to a secret place in the woods, a grove enclosed by trees. “I wait for you here,” she said, “but you never, never come, you never come for me.” Lying in the grass now, he next to her, she said love. “But you’re my child,” he said. “Listen,” she said, her mouth to his ear. He listened. Remembered. Love. Her kiss. Remembered it. And all the time, without his knowing, without anyone knowing, they had been lovers. He opened his eyes, and she … It had never happened.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Lois said, her voice strangely charged. “But you look so beautiful when you sleep.”

  He put his hands over his face. “Come to bed,” he said.

  She shook her head, watching him with curious detachment, as though he were on exhibit under glass.

  He took her arm. Pulled. “You look beautiful,” he said.

  “You’re hurting me, Peter.”

  He let go.

  “You were dreaming of another girl,” she said, moving away from him, “and I woke you.” She was in the kitchen again, the familiar sounds of her activity coming through like a novelty record he had heard once too often.

  “Lois,” he called in a loud voice, “come back here.”

  He was surprised that she returned (an armistice in the war of wills?), disturbed at his inability to understand her. “I’m making you breakfast, like a dutiful wife,” she said.

  “Are you in love with someone else?” he said, the question unintended, surprising him, as though someone else had asked it. He didn’t want to know.

  Lois shrugged, started several times to say something, shook her head.

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “I’ve always been in love with Stanley,” she said, a faint smile somewhere in the tight line of her mouth.

  So. He listened to the voice, unlistened to it, incredulous, as if he hadn’t already known. And he discovered—a murderous insight—that for all his suspicions (all of them: millions), he hadn’t known anything until this minute. He refused to believe it. Only in his dreams were they lovers.

  “Since we were children,” she added as if talking to herself, musing, sipping her fingers.

  And without looking, Peter could see them, a ten-year-old couple, a born dance team, Lois and Stanley going at it like monkeys in Lois’s mother’s kitchen, the crowd cheering them on. The youngest of their kind, someone said. It’s a world record. He turned to the wall and they were there.

  “Do you hate me?” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “You told me,” he said, “when you told me about him the first time, that you no longer loved him.” Anguish, rage, love, like fish bones in his throat, choked him.

  “I love you both,” she said sadly. “You don’t want me to lie to you, do you?”

  “No,” he muttered, and got up and turned off the heat.

  “I love you too,” she said.

  He paced the room, caged, furious, knocking over a chair, two chairs; a table hit him back. “God damn you!” he yelled, but no sound came out. Lois was on her back, staring at the ceiling, which, according to the landlord, was newly painted colorless.

  “Peter …”

  “What?”

  “Will you love me, will you make love to me?”

  “Why don’t you get Stanley?”

  “I can’t. He hates me for marrying you.”

  “Well, I hate you more than he does.”

  “Dear God, I know, I know.” And she began to cry. “I know.”

  “I didn’t mean it, Lois,” he said, coming over to the bed. “I’m sorry.”

  Watching her cry, he drowned.

  “Go away,” she said, meaning I can’t stop crying: love me. They kissed under water, under salt, slipping. Sticking. Without desire, with their clothes on (he in torn pajamas), Peter loved his wife and other ghosts. Under water.

  “You hate me,” she whispered, a bubble.

  “I don’t.”

  You do. Don’t. Do.

  Dont hateyoudonthateyou.

  And leaves, dead lovers, Stanley, Gloria, Delilah, others, children, strange ghosts, sea monsters, movie stars, name bands, vocalists, swimmers: they went at it. All of them. Un
der water. Impersonal as fish, as husbandandwife, as fish.

  Too many strangers, strange ghosts at once, is exhausting.

  Among them, someone—Lois—said, “We’re so much alike, it’s like incest.”

  Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. “I love you,” he wanted to say, but he couldn’t—out of breath, drowning. Lost, he went deeper, as far as he could go, to an apparently bottomless place, a den of dragons, where he found her, his wife, his sister, himself, hiding, alone, without skin, found himself there, tourist and voyeur. Lover.

  “God, I love you,” it said, himself said, loving her. At the moment he loved them all, loved all the others too. And Lois. She murmured something unintelligible. What? He heard what he heard. He loved her.

  Afterward, in his dreams, he felt a sense of loss.

  | 7 |

  Lois was in the shower, washing off the day’s dirt, when someone rang the bell. Peter Becker? Who else could it be? He had a knack, a life history of showing up at the wrong time.

  “Just a minute,” she called in a voice just loud enough to discharge her of the obligation of answering. One regrets the intrusions of the past.

  The longer Peter waited the more panicked he became. What presumption it had been to show up unannounced after all these years, seedy, tattered, the sour look of failure. It was out of pity—how else explain it?—that she had invited him to dinner, charity from the soup kitchen of nostalgia; he couldn’t afford it. Still, there were questions he had to ask her …

  He was already down the street when the door opened.

  “Peter … Peter. Where are you going?”

  He turned around reluctantly. “I just remembered,” he said, waving. “I have another appointment.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “Come on in. You have an appointment here.” She stood in front of the house, shivering, frail in a black silk dress, her hair blowing loose.

  “All right,” he muttered. His feet were cold. He trudged back across the matted snow, his footprints immortalized coming and going.

  “I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” she said, fluttering, nervous about him, “but I had just taken a shower, I wasn’t dressed.”

  He nodded, following her inside, afraid that Patton would be there, curiously disappointed that he wasn’t.

  There was no one else in the apartment. Lois excused herself, to finish whatever it was, in the disguise of getting dressed, that she had left undone. Alone, his coat still on, Peter toured the living room, an aimless search, mostly to warm his feet. A swollen African madonna hung on the lip of the fireplace, ready to give birth. He prodded the navel with his finger and had the curious sensation, the belly warm from the fire, that there was something moving inside. In an odd way it disturbed him.

  He inspected the apartment as though it were a museum. He felt somehow that he ought to take notes on what he saw, but it would look foolish if Lois came in, and he hadn’t a pencil anyway. There were some prints on the wall—he recognized the Klee and the Picasso—and an original painting (a portrait of a girl in black), book shelves filled with new books, fiction in dust jackets, some paperbacks (also new), a few expensive-looking art books, a few books left over from the days of their marriage. In his browsing he discovered a copy of Ulysses he had once given her as a gift. A terrible nostalgia overwhelmed him. He took the book off the shelf, just to hold it in his hands, a dusty book, as if it were the past itself. He vaguely remembered having written something in it: an inscription. What was it? He closed his eyes and tried to recall it—the book burning his hands—but all he could remember was “. … for the season of memory. Love always, Peter,” which was something else, from some other occasion. His memory its own season, burning without light. Still, it was enough to hold the book in his hands—too much. Tears hung fire at the back of his eyes. In holding the book, he seemed to unlive the years, dead and wasted, that separated him from it. If only it were possible for him to begin again, to start over at the starting point—with Lois, with himself. He blew his nose. (Nostalgia warmed him like a sun lamp.) With a lover’s delicacy, he opened the book as though it might crumble in his hands and found no inscription inside, no word to indicate that it had been a gift from him. Could the past erase itself of its own volition? Spooked, he shuffled the pages, looking for evidence of his memory and found, stumbling on it—a curiously painful discovery—that the front page had been neatly clipped out, the scar barely visible. He was sorry he had looked. Reminded of the time he had searched her purse in the bathroom, he suffered the memory of his humiliation—a man perpetually embarrassed at himself. Hearing Lois, he hurriedly slipped the book back into its place. As he turned to her he realized—a delayed image—that the book had been put away upside down; she would know that he had looked at it, that he knew. What difference did it make?

  Lois was solicitous, polite, treated Peter with conscientious kindness, as though he were an old friend of an old friend—buried him with charity.

  In turn, he withdrew, answered when spoken to, accepted whatever was offered him. It was terrible. All through the meal—a fine dinner of steak, baked potato, red wine—he wanted to break something. An accident, he succeeded in knocking over his half-filled glass, spilling wine on the brocaded white linen tablecloth, the stain purple, swelling.

  “Damn!” she said softly, staring at the stain with horror, as though it were something she had lost of herself. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all right.” She looked up, smiling, a crease of pain in her eyes.

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “What else could it have been?”

  “Look,” he said, not looking at her, “why did you walk out on me?”

  He could almost feel her wince. “What?” she said. “Excuse me, I didn’t hear you.”

  He shook his head. “I want to understand my life,” he said. “I want …” There was no point in continuing.

  She refilled his wine glass, the amoebic stain like a huge hand between them. “Be nice, Peter,” she said. “Please.”

  The steak tasted to him like his own flesh, but he continued to chew it vengefully, without appetite, unable to swallow. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  He looked up, met her eyes—pinched, unloving—his whole life a mistake. “What’s the use?” he said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “It doesn’t matter …” She covered her face with her hands.

  “Lois,” he said. The table was between them; the stain continued to swell. “My life has been a series of mistakes and I seem to make the same ones over and over, whatever I do is wrong.”

  She looked up, shrugged, besieged by some dim memory of her own.

  “What went wrong?” he said, barely a whisper.

  She turned her head as if she had been struck, and was too proud, too much in pain to acknowledge that it had happened. “What do you want, Peter?” The question an accusation.

  You. The past. He couldn’t answer.

  “I don’t mean to be a bitch,” she said, “but you can’t show up after fifteen years and make claims on my life. Don’t demand so much.”

  “What am I demanding?”

  “You know very well … I’d better start the coffee. Eat your steak, it’s getting cold.” She took her own plate, half finished, into the kitchen.

  “Lois, I don’t want anything,” he said; she closed the door behind her, between them.

  His food was cold.

  She came back in a few minutes, smiling tremulously, the resolve of a new face. “The coffee will be ready in a few minutes,” she said. “Are you through?”

  He nodded. “Very good, the food,” he said.

  She laughed strangely. “You haven’t eaten very much.” She laughed again—a tense, sad gaiety that touched him.

  “I liked it too well to eat it,” he said. “I’m joking,” he added solemnly.

  She shrugged, a smile frozen across her face as though it were a wound. “Excuse me, the coffee should be ready.” She
buzzed out, smiling, then back, grabbing his plate, smiling, and out again. And back.

  “Where would you like your coffee?” she said. “We can have it in the living room, if you prefer. Or doesn’t it make any difference?”

  “I don’t care …” She served him his coffee at the table and was off into the kitchen again for something else.

  Her strangeness made him shy of her. “Lois,” he said softly, more to himself than to her, “what are you doing?”

  She returned. “Did you say something, Peter?”

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  The longer they faced each other the harder it was to talk, to say anything that wasn’t only talk.

  “You used to take milk and coffee in your sugar,” Lois said. “Sugar in your coffee, I mean.” Her laughter like a cough. “Both of us have changed,” she said.

  “How have you changed?”

  She started to say something, thought about it, pursed her lips, shrugged. “I don’t want as much as I used to … Would you like some brandy, Peter?”

  He shrugged. It was impossible to talk. What had he expected? he asked himself. Sitting in the room’s one comfortable chair, a glass of brandy in his hand, Peter had the impatiently determined look of a man who knows that if he waits long enough, the weather will change. And nothing happened. There was no weather. Lois talked to avoid the silence, but the silence remained like a ghost in the room, denying her words.

  There was nothing but talk, punctuated by paralytic grins, as if in a nightmare of hell they were doomed to rehash commonplaces over and over until madness.

  “Are you happy?” he asked, interrupting her in the middle of an anecdote.

  “I’m happy,” she said, holding on to a smile that seemed to bend her mouth under its weight. “As much as anyone is. Yes, I’m happy. Why did you ask?” She glanced at her watch.

  “I suppose I should go,” he said, lethargic, enveloped in the chair’s comfort.

  “Do you think I look unhappy?” she said, her voice anxiously casual.

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking at her, his eyes evading the implications of their knowledge. She was still a lovely woman, but a vague sense of disappointment tortured her face, as if her life had promised wonderful possibilities and for no accountable reason had failed to make good on them. He might have been looking in the mirror.