A Man to Conjure With

by Jonathan Baumbach

  The girl, a young witch, watched her water lovingly, added salt and toad’s blood and stirred.

  The floor pressed against his feet. “I want to see you, Lois,” he whispered, cupping his hand over his mouth to prevent the young witch at the stove from eavesdropping.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Can I see you some time?” he muttered. The kitchen was boiling.

  There was no response at the other end—no sound of life—as if Lois were no longer there. He waited without faith, holding his breath.

  The pug-nosed witch went by, carrying her potion in a coffee mug, winking her butt at him as she passed. He stared at the wall. No one is ever home when I call, it said.

  “Lois, say something.”

  “I can’t.” Her speech punctuated by sobs. “Every time I look in the mirror I start to cry. Something about the way I look—it’s funny—makes me cry … Leave me alone, Peter. It’s better if you leave me alone.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Go away. Please.” Her voice rose almost to a scream. “Go away. All I want out of life is for you to leave me alone. That’s all. Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  “All right,” he said in a tremulously brave voice. “All right. All right.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said softly.

  He laughed brokenly—a man reprieved after the execution.

  “I think about you,” she whispered. “Yesterday, I remembered a time we went to the country together; it was on a Saturday, I think, and we were just friends at that time, not even lovers yet, just friends. It was in April or early May and it was a beautiful day—do you remember?—with no sun at all. We sat in the grass and just talked, sometimes in silences we talked—you know. Everything came back to me just as it was. You were chewing on a strand of grass. We hardly even touched that day. It was like the silence. Everything just happened.” Her voice wistful, strange.

  He had no recollection of it. “Where in the country did we go?”

  “Bear Mountain. Don’t you remember? You were wearing a blue shirt.” He tried but couldn’t remember the occasion she had described.

  “I tell you what—why don’t we go to Bear Mountain next weekend?” he said, exhilarated, afraid—terrified—of being refused.

  “Do you really want to? Really?”

  The witch-girl had come back into the kitchen, smiling teeth and gums; it distracted him. “You must be fond of that phone,” she whispered. He nodded.

  “Peter?” Lois said. “I don’t know.”

  “Either Saturday or Sunday is all right with me,” he said, his sense of defeat quickening. “Whichever is better for you is better for me.”

  “I can’t, Peter.”

  “Some other time?” he suggested, compelled to lose everything.

  “Peter,” she said gently, pitying him, “it wouldn’t be any good. It wouldn’t.”

  “All right.”

  “I just can’t,” she said, as if it were a physical impossibility. “You can’t live things over, once they’re over; it’s never the same—you know that. It’s less painful if we don’t see each other.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t be hurt,” she said, a trace of malice in her concern.

  “Who me?” he said savagely. “Nothing touches me.”

  “I’m just trying to be strong,” she said piteously.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Let me have a number I can reach you at. It’s better that you don’t call me here. You understand.”

  He read the number off the dial. “It’s a public phone.”

  The witch laughed.

  “Hold on,” Lois said.

  He waited. The witch-girl was standing at the window, munching an apple, her back to him. The receiver pressed painfully against his ear; his arm ached from the effort of holding it up. Voices from somewhere within. Then Lois was back. “My mother doesn’t want me to talk to you,” she said. “She thinks it’s bad for me.” Starting as a laugh, a series of dry coughs racked her. “I’ve been smoking too much. It’s a form of compensation.”

  “I’ve been sleeping too much,” he confided. “It’s impossible for me to stay awake. I fall asleep on subways and ride past my stop. The more I sleep, the tireder I feel.”

  “I can’t seem to sleep,” she said mournfully. “Peter, why do you want to see me again? I have to know the reason.”

  It wasn’t easy to explain. “Because I want to see you,” he said. “I miss you.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “Because …” Could he tell her what he didn’t know himself? His reasons were his reasons. What else could he say?

  “Why?”

  “I want to make you whole,” he said. The words came by themselves; he merely spoke them.

  Lois moaned softly, a painful yield, her strained breathing like a pulse in the phone. Then, as he waited for her, she was gone, the connection choking almost painlessly. He hung on, the dead receiver at his ear, waiting for the impossibility of her return. The witch-girl smiled and smiled.

  “Why did I say that to Lois?” he asked the doctor at the start of their next session.

  “What do you think?” Dr. Cantor said.

  “I’d rather hear your explanation,” Peter said, suddenly suspicious of the doctor’s professional reticence. Perhaps the man had nothing to say.

  “I think it would be better if you told me,” Cantor said gently. “Try to recall what you had in mind, what you were feeling when you made the remark.”

  “How do I know you understand what I tell you, if you never tell me what you know?”

  “Why should it matter to you what I understand?” the doctor said. “It’s what you understand about yourself that’s important. I explained this to you before.” The same weary benevolence.

  “What if I don’t believe it?” he said, sitting up as an act of defiance, though looking at the floor and not at the doctor.

  “It doesn’t matter to me whether you do or not. If you’re trying to hurt me, let me tell you that it’s having no effect. Are you ready to continue?” The doctor was writing in his notebook again.

  When Peter didn’t answer, his mind somewhere else, the doctor repeated the question.

  “I’d rather not,” he said. “I have no faith in it.” He had the feeling of being trapped in an airless place, suffocating, as in a dream, without hope of relief. “Nothing is happening,” he said. “Nothing happens.” He stood up cautiously and began walking, as though on a ledge outside a ten-story window, across the yellow rug toward the way out. During all this time, the doctor said nothing.

  “I’m leaving,” Peter announced, in case Cantor hadn’t noticed.

  “I can see that,” the doctor said. “If you want to continue with our talks sometime, Peter, feel free to call.”

  “Am I making a mistake?” he asked.

  “That’s for you to say,” Cantor said. “I don’t want to influence your decision. Whether you know it or not, you’ve made a good deal of progress since you started.”

  “I hope I didn’t bore you too much.”

  “Good luck.”

  “You too.” He hung on, liking the doctor, regretting having to leave, wondering why it was that a few minutes before, he had been in such a panic to get out. “Good-bye,” he said. “I’ll certainly call you, Dr. Cantor, if I feel I need this again.”

  “Remember,” the doctor said, “it’s the nature of human beings to be imperfect. To be imperfect is merely to be human.”

  He came out into the air, aware of the legacy of his humanity, a free man, with no place he wanted to go, nothing he really wanted to do. He wandered the streets hungrily, as if he had just come into the world, oppressed after a while by the futility of his freedom; then he went home to his furnished room to sleep. He had a sense of being merely imperfect. He valued his loss.

  That night he had a dream. Lois was being operated on in Cantor’s office by a team of doctors—he counted
seven and the shadow of an eighth—all wearing grocer’s aprons.

  “The more we learn,” Cantor was saying, “the more complicated this operation becomes. We know so much these days, sometimes it seems impossible to perform the most minute operation, the removal of a wart, for example, without the death of the patient. Besides, none of us is perfect.”

  “I want you to stop the operation,” Peter said. “We’ve changed our minds.” Then, as he tried to get through to the operating table, two burly doctors planted themselves in his way.

  “It’s too late to stop,” Cantor informed him. “We’ve already removed the head. You’ll be proud to know,” he said, beaming, “that the little creature bears a striking resemblance to its father. You’ll excuse me. These doctors can’t get anything right without my instructions. Good luck.” Cantor patted him on the back, and was gone.

  Herbie came by. “Would you like a nurse while you’re waiting? It’ll help pass the time.”

  Peter shook his head. “What’s taking so long?” he wanted to know.

  “Who knows? Just don’t worry so much. Come on downstairs; I’ll get you a nurse.” Herbie was tugging at his arm.

  He fought his way through the mob of doctors to the operating table. Henderson and Cantor seemed to be conducting, between them, some sort of class. “The three-month-old fetus is barely human,” Henderson was saying, holding up a plastic doll, “and in its atavistic way, resembles the New York City cab driver: note the low forehead and large ears.”

  The operating table was empty except for some bloody mess in a black tin basin. “Where’s Lois?” he asked, interrupting the lecture.

  No one seemed to know. “She slipped away during the operation,” the doctor next to him whispered. “They’ve lost her.”

  “Hold him,” someone said. “He may be the one they’re looking for.” Crawling on his hands and knees—the floor slightly tilted—Peter got to the anteroom undiscovered. A three-legged cat bounded over to him, rubbed its head against his knee. He picked it up gingerly, hugged it to his face; it froze in his arms. Lois’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Peter, give yourself up. For my sake, please give yourself up. No one will hurt you.”

  There was a police siren. He continued to crawl, the corpse o fthe deformed can still in his arms. Babies were crying. He begged them to be quiet. A crowd of doctors was pursuing him. One of the baby baskets was unoccupied; on his hands and knees, he crawled toward it. A woman called his name. He twisted himself around to look. Lois was standing there enormously pregnant. He awoke.

  He loved her, he told himself in the grip of dark, which, as he knew—he had learned as a fact—was the nostalgia of fantasy. If you don’t love yourself, Cantor’s silence had taught him, you are incapable of loving anyone. So he wept for the death of his eternally unborn child, for the deaths of all of them: his mother, Delilah, Lois, his father, Herbie, Dr. Cantor, Dr. Henderson, for nameless others, for himself, for all he had ever wished dead, but mostly for himself. In his dreams, a man of fantasies, he loved them all.

  | 11 |

  Peter went to visit Gloria for an hour and stayed three weeks.

  The first thing she said to him when he came through the door was, “Peter, I can’t stand being alone. I’m not used to it.”

  What could he do but stay with her? (His brother’s mistress, they were practically related.)

  So he stayed. But each day—his clothes, most of himself in the rooming house on 113th Street—he planned to leave the next day.

  Gloria made no demands on him except that he listen to “Stardust” with her every once in a while. Though no one asked him to, Peter slept alone, had bad dreams, on the Goodwill couch in the living room.

  Their evenings together were like wakes. Gloria talked about Herbie as though he had recently died—his tainted memory still fresh. Peter half listened, breathing old ghosts of his own. During the day Gloria worked (so she told him) at Bloomingdale’s, the sullen star of the flying squad, with plenty of room for advancement. But it was only for the money; in her heart of hearts, she was really a singer, among other things. Among other things, she was also something of a dancer. In the evenings, for Peter’s benefit, she practiced her dancing, tried out new and star-making routines, humming like a wounded bird in time to the heavy music of her feet. “I’m really more of an entertainer,” she confided to him one night. Peter applauded, shouted for more. The more Peter appreciated her, the darker was Gloria’s sulk. You could fool a singer maybe or a dancer, but not an entertainer. Entertainers know better. Entertainers know they can’t sing or dance; that’s their secret. What entertainers have is wisdom.

  And Peter was numb. No matter what he did, it was as if it were happening to someone else. To whom? To the shadow he dragged alongside him under his feet, which gyrated when he walked as if it were trying to get away from him.

  Peter was on the move so much (keep busy, everyone advised), he hardly noticed that he wasn’t there. That he wasn’t where he was. In the early morning he drove a school bus for the Collegiate School for Boys; in the afternoon from one to five he worked in a bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue. Two evenings a week, on Monday and Wednesday from seven to ten, he took classes at Brooklyn College. His latest major, his fifth in four years, was philosophy. He felt at home with epistemology. Unable to feel, he was content for the present merely to know. To know about knowing. In his spare time he juggled relationships, traveled subways (moving underground between two apartments), made deals, read books, forgot himself. And at night he didn’t sleep.

  “You know, you look like one of those zombies,” Gloria said to him, turning off the phonograph—a rare moment. “You know what I think … I think you’re going to kill yourself if you don’t watch out.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  The silence troubled her—she couldn’t hear it—and reflexively, as one might scratch an itch, she put a new stack of records on the changer. An album of Old Favorites. She snapped her fingers in anticipation.

  “Music is the fruit of love or something,” she said, one zombie to another.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “How do you like that?”

  She shook her head, pitying him. “You know,” she said, “I think you’re still carrying a torch for that girl.”

  He laughed the notion out of court, showing bleeding gums, gray teeth, and other wounds. “I only have eyes for you,” he said, looking at the discolored rug—the stains, wherever they were distinguishable, an improvement on the original pattern.

  Gloria studied him through veiled lids. “You’re a liar,” she summed him up, swaying in place to the music. “Dance with me.” She held out her arms.

  He knew he had something to do, nagged by voiceless whispers of anticipation, but whatever it was—the ghosts of his nerves told him—it had long since ceased to matter. The flowering wallpaper bloomed and died in a moment’s vision. “I’ll just watch,” he said, getting up, changing his seat.

  “You do that.” She shook, shaking everything, the music like wind in her sails. “We never do anything,” she said. “Never but never but never do anything, anything. Anything.”

  Peter got up, heavy-footed, looking for something to do. There were mystery stories, women’s magazines, his own philosophy books: nothing to read. He went to the refrigerator for a beer, found none, settled with evil heart for a 7-Up.

  “You’ll feel much better if you dance,” Gloria said, crossing his path. “Take my word, it takes your mind off things.”

  “I should be doing something,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the couch. Standing up.

  “Don’t you think I’d like to do something?” she said. “I never want to do anything, do I? You and Herbie think you’re the only ones …” Swaying in place to the music, she clutched the imaginary outline of a partner, her dreams remote, her eyes misted-over with roseate recollection.

  And Peter felt the need to be doing, to be moving. He wanted to do something, though there was nothing he could think of
he wanted to do. For a moment he thought of calling Dr. Cantor, whom, for no reason he could remember, he had stopped seeing. But when he thought of the details of the call itself—the painful impossibility of talk—he gave up the idea with a pang of relief. “Let’s go to Coney Island,” he said suddenly, excited at the discovery of his own suggestion, as though he had stumbled on a valued possession that had been lost and forgotten for years. “Huh? Do you like going on rides, Gloria?”

  She grunted, shrugged. “If you really want to go. But Peter, it’ll take at least an hour or more by subway. And I’ve been standing on my feet all day.” She sighed her exhaustion, easing herself with ancient grace onto the sofa. “Why don’t you go yourself if you really want to go?”

  “Maybe I will.” He sat down across from her, watched the flowered walls, dreamed the suffocation of their scent. “I have another idea, Gloria. How would you like to go for a ride on the Staten Island ferry?” He waited for no response. “It’s only a nickel,” he added persuasively.

  Gloria was unimpressed. “What’s there?”

  He didn’t know. “Staten Island,” he said with the sly confidence of an inspired guess. When he thought about it, riding back and forth on the ferry seemed a foolish waste of time. You ended, when it was over, only back where you began.

  “What do you do when you get there?” she asked, tapping her foot absently. “I mean, what’s there?”

  “When you get there,” he said, “generally what you do is come back. Sometimes you walk around Staten Island and take the next boat back.” He yawned, though he wasn’t sleepy. (He was hungry.)

  “Big deal,” she said sadly, used to better things.

  They argued other possibilities: “How about a movie?” “How about it?” “Let’s do anything, for God’s sake.” “Let’s do something.” “Whatever you want to do.” “I want to do anything, anything.” Anything? The conversation exhausted itself. They danced on nerve endings to the music of silence. There was nothing to say.

  Peter went through the bones of the refrigerator like an excavator, found nothing of interest, ate everything in sight—mostly pretzels and American cheese. Gloria danced.