A Man to Conjure With

by Jonathan Baumbach

  He found a wilted daisy at his feet, the last of the season, and presented it to her.

  She cupped the flower to her mouth. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered to it, crumpling it. “Have you missed me?”

  When he said no, her face trembled, fell apart.

  “Hey,” he said, holding her face together with his hands, “I’m kidding, Lois. Don’t you know I missed you? I missed you. What I missed most about you was your bawling. I missed that. Nobody cries on 113th Street.”

  “I’m not crying now,” she said, faintly amused in spite of a predilection to be angry. Barely. Not. “And I wasn’t the only one who cried,” she said sadly, his failure looming up before her—all memory stained with regret. “Peter, what’s going to become of us?”

  For a moment the sun died. Coming off the Hudson, the wind haunted the grass, conjured ghosts of dust. Lois shivered. Peter covered her with his arm.

  The sun returned. They sat, she inside his shoulder, stiff shadows of themselves like snapshots in an album, hoarding the past.

  Peter worried that it would end. Memory, the fret of old resentments, separated them.

  “If you’re moving out, why don’t you come and live with me,” he said.

  She smiled, shook her head reflexively, unable to believe in survival, grateful for the myth of its possibility.

  He kissed her, her mouth a stranger, generous and indifferent.

  He held her to him. “Stay a while longer, Lois,” he pleaded.

  “Can’t.” Then she kissed him, a good-bye kiss, warm (blossoming) with the nostalgia of impossibility. “I worry about you, Peter,” she said distantly—a lover’s truth. “You fail at everything you do, baby. Will you ever amount to anything?”

  It wasn’t a question he could answer. “I need you around,” he said lightly, “to make a success of me.” They were standing now, getting ready to leave. Lois was crying.

  “I wasn’t any good for you,” she said. “We weren’t any good for each other. Only for a time, before we were married, did things seem possible. I can’t stop crying.”

  He held her to him, unable to relinquish his memory of her. “I still miss you,” he said.

  Her body turned against him, all bones and angles, in a sudden tremor of fear. “You’re not going to contest the annulment?” she asked.

  When he said she could have the annulment, two if she wanted, she relaxed, and kissed him good-bye again. “It was a good afternoon,” she said, documenting the fact for posterity. “In some way I’ll always love you, Peter. I will.”

  “In what way?” he wanted to know.

  “Walk with me to Broadway,” she said, collecting her purse, her things. She took his hand. “You’re really better than anyone.”

  They walked quickly. “It was a good afternoon,” she said again. “I’m glad we met, aren’t you?”

  He nodded without moving his head.

  “Are you sorry about today? Do you think it was a mistake to meet if we’re not going to see each other any more?”

  He shook his head, trying to dislodge words yet unborn. “I wanted to see you,” he said slowly, as though he were a child speaking the only words he knew. A groan of laughter escaped. “I feel great,” he moaned. The weight of the city settled on his chest.

  “I know,” she commiserated. “It’s terrible, I can’t stop crying.” Wiping her eyes with her scarf, tears coming faster than the ones she erased. Her face bone-thin, scarred with tears, beautiful to him. “I’d better go. I have to meet someone,” she said. “Peter, I wish it were you I were seeing.”

  Obsessed, he turned on her. “Who’re you going out with?” he asked as if it were a matter of curiosity—he fooled nobody.

  She turned her head in a gesture of impatience. “What difference does it make?” she said gently. “Let’s say good-bye here, Peter.” They were on 110th and Broadway—the IRT station across the street. They shook hands, lingered. She offered him her face to be kissed. A madwoman passed them, muttering, waving her head at them as she passed. “You’re dirtying the streets,” she mumbled. “Get off.” Lois laughed.

  They walked to 108th Street, then wandered back to 110th. “I have to run,” Lois said, making no move to go. “Will you kiss me good-bye?” She laughed giddily. “That’s all we’ve done all day—is kiss each other good-bye.”

  Her undereyes were charred, he noticed for the first time, like burnt-out fuses; her face tortured and amazingly beautiful in the late-afternoon shade. They embraced delicately, afraid of breakage.

  They separated, Lois looking around as if concerned at who might be watching. They embraced again.

  “Lois,” he said quickly; it was something he had to know. “When we were married, was there someone else …?” He watched her face as he asked but there was nothing to see, her eyes impassive or merely indifferent. And nothing happened. A twist of pain, almost a smile, lit the corner of her mouth. Then, abruptly, she turned and ran across the street into the entrance of the subway, her long hair in back unknotting, spilling loose as she went down the stairs. “Lois,” he called, “I didn’t mean it.” He was too tired to follow.

  | 12 |

  When he got back to his room there was a note under his door, printed in large, childlike red letters on yellow drawing paper: SOME GLORIA WANTS YOU TO CALL HER. KEEP IT UP. It was unsigned. He put the note away in his wastebasket for future reference, and paced the length of the room, six steps each way, as calm as a stone; then he picked up a straight-backed chair and for the hell of it heaved it against the wall, watching it dance its way up, then, shivering, flailing its limbs, slide to the floor. The wall bruised black, the greenish plaster chipped away where the chair had danced. Following the chair, Peter’s fist cracked into the wall, pulled back at the instant of contact, the wall turning soft, bleeding. His hand tingled without pleasure. The room murdered him with its cuts. The price of victory, he discovered, is the shared acknowledgment of defeat.

  Sour rage mocked his efforts, though he did his mean best. He took them all on: chairs, desk, ceiling, walls, dresser, memories—one by one, all at once, as they came on from all sides—mechanical, murderous, intent on taking his life. He didn’t quit until it was over, and then, exhilarated—his wounds like medals—he spread himself out on the floor and went to sleep.

  “Telephone, Becker,” someone called, and Peter heard—the name Becker familiar, his own name even—but it made in the larger contexts of movement and desire no difference, no difference at all.

  “Becker, telephone. Telephone, you stupid bastard. You dumb shit. Schmuck, failure, clown, crap head, schmegeggi”

  They were calling him.

  “Hello,” he said. It was long distance—he could tell from the drone of voices in the background.

  “Come home.”

  “I am home. Who the hell is this?”

  “Come on home, fellow. We need you.”

  “Yeah? What for?”

  “What a question! We need you to show us how it’s done.”

  “I don’t mind. Who’s this calling, please?”

  “How do you do it? What’s the story?”

  “Well, you see, the way I do it is this …” He cleared his throat.

  “Great!”

  “I haven’t finished. You see …”

  “I get it. Never finish anything ‘cause the finish is the end. That’s the secret, huh? Everything should be uncompleted, because that’s life—man, I mean you’re dead when you’re done. I follow you. If you ask me, I think you’re really on to something.”

  “I don’t want to argue with you, but I don’t think you’re getting what I’m saying. I think everything you start ought to be finished.”

  “Kill ‘em all, huh? I like that even better. Finish them off before they finish you off. Will you come home, Sam, and show us how it’s done? We haven’t had a hero in these parts in a dog’s age.”

  “Sam? I think you have the wrong number, buddy.”

  “That’s the way i
t is. Some days you get only wrong numbers no matter who you call. Anyway, keep up the good work, boy, and let’s hear from you now and again. What do you say?” Before Peter could say anything, the phone went dead.

  ‘What are you doing on the floor?” someone said, nudging him in the ribs with the toe of a shoe. “Did you fall? What happened to you?”

  “The bed moved,” he said, a joker even in his dreams, but when he looked up—the walls moving in odd ways—he wasn’t dreaming. (Helena, the dark witch of the kitchen, was straightening up his room.)

  He blinked his eyes.

  “I got tired of waiting for you to invite me in,” she said. “There was all this noise. I came in to see if you were all right.”

  His body ached: head, hands, back. The room half dark, he wondered what time it was, what day. What year. “I’m all right,” he said, groaning, trying to find a painless way of getting up. He had the feeling, still undefined, that he had lost something. “How did you get here?” he asked, not quite sure yet that he wasn’t the one out of place.

  “The door was open,” she said. “Do you want me to go away?” She was sitting on his bed, her back against the wall, with a kind of proprietary confidence. “I’ll go if you want me to. I know I’m much too aggressive; I have a way of imposing on people who interest me, so if you want to get rid of me, just say so. I won’t be hurt. Just tell me to get out.”

  “All right. Get out,” he said.

  She didn’t move. “That was a cruel thing to say. Men who feel inadequate tend to assert themselves by being cruel,” she said with impressive authority, “but I didn’t expect that of you; you have a kind, generous face. It’s not handsome but it’s a nice face, a kind face.”

  “What do you want from me?” He worked himself into a sitting position to get a better look at her, a sullen, knowing witch.

  “Not what you think,” she said, sucking on her wrist. “In fact, I don’t want anything from you. Okay?”

  “Good.” Curling up on the bed of the floor, his eyes closed, Peter pretended to sleep, exhausted beyond the possibility of sleep—charting his wounds in the body’s memory. Several times, in and out of his dreams, he thought he heard his visitor leave—each time gently banging the door after her so as not to disturb him, so as to make him aware of her consideration. But when he got up, confident that he was alone, Helena was there, perched on his bed as before, a guardian owl, a mad-eyed witch. And the hell of it was, he was pleased to see her.

  “Why don’t you come in?” he said, sitting next to her on the bed, receiving messages from uncharted pains.

  She condemned him with a look, stared at the ceiling—he had to look around to make sure it was his room they were in. And who had asked her in?

  What the hell did she want from him anyway? He wondered if his breath was bad—his tongue sour—unable to remember the last time he brushed his teeth. Why not? he told himself, putting his arm around her shoulders, only to have it lifted off and returned to him, his bruised knuckles brushing the wall.

  He groaned.

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” she said, holding his hand in front of her, reading his wounds like a prophetess. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I have a way of hurting people without meaning to.”

  “Why don’t you go back to your room?” he said.

  She looked at him piteously, her eyes filling with tears. “Please help me,” she said.

  “What kind of help do you need?” he asked as a reflex, not wanting to know.

  So she told him. A long story about a former teacher of hers—married, with a family—“a very good friend,” who was fatally in love with her. He listened uneasily, suspending belief, incapable of disbelief—the story familiar and incredible. And why was she telling it to him?

  “I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said, “but to continue the relationship as it was would have been a lie. Do you see what I mean?”

  He nodded out of courtesy, seeing nothing, which in its own way was too much.

  “It was terrible,” she said, slowing down to reflect. “He refused to believe me. He said he knew I loved him—that it was my analysis that was screwing things up. The poor guy! He was deliberately blocking what he didn’t want to hear. I told him that I still admired him a great deal, that I thought he was a brilliant man, which he is, though he has certain blind spots, but that—I couldn’t help it—I no longer was in love with him. Then he broke up and started accusing me of things, and crying. It was pitiful.” She glanced at Peter’s face. “You think I’m a bitch, don’t you?”

  He shrugged, scowled, depression embracing him like an unwanted lover.

  “You think so, don’t you?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “You do. I can tell from your face. But if you understand me better, you’ll know I don’t mean to be. I really felt sorry for Harry—do you know him? Harry Lowenstein? He teaches sociology at Barnard. I couldn’t stand seeing him, a man I had admired so much, behave so badly, so … this’ll sound silly to you … I went to bed with him. It was mostly out of pity.” She glanced at Peter to catch his response. “I did it to help him regain his confidence,” she said, the shakiness of her voice belying the smugness of her remark. “Afterward we agreed not to see each other again.”

  Helena turned silent. Peter got up and paced the room, still wobbly from his bout with the furniture. “Was that the end of it?” he asked, curious in spite of himself. (He promised himself, no matter what—love and death all the same to him—not to get involved.) “What was Harry like?” he asked, merely to make conversation.

  Helena stared at her hands, enjoyed the melodrama of silence.

  Peter looked out his only window, which offered a choice view of the corner of Broadway and 113th Street, and suspected, in the space of five minutes, three different men, one enormously fat, of being Harry.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “He wants to see me again.”

  When Peter sat down at his desk the chair collapsed under him, spilling him heavily, the floor receiving him as its own. What had he expected? The inanimate always seemed to have it in for him—in conspiracy against him. He decided to remain on the floor—his arms spread-eagled—accepting the fate of his role, awaiting sympathy.

  The girl seemed unaware of his tragedy. “What am I going to do?” she complained. “He’s coming here tonight to see me; he may be here already, for all I know.” Without asking him, she latched his door from the inside. “Harry can be very violent when he doesn’t get his way. He’s a paranoid type, Peter, which as you probably know can be very dangerous. Did you hurt yourself?”

  “A little.” Peter climbed to his feet recklessly, showing off.

  “I put the chair together so that the room would look better. You weren’t supposed to sit on it.”

  Peter wandered about, looking for a place to sit. Both chairs were broken; he settled for the edge of the bed.

  Helena bounced up as though tilted from the bed by Peter’s weight. “No matter what I tell him, he insists on seeing me. When I told him that I didn’t want to break up his marriage, you should have seen him—he wasn’t rational, Peter. He grabbed my arm in such a way that I thought he was going to break it.” She stalked the window like a skittish kitten playing at being a tiger, and standing sideways at the window’s edge, peered through the half-closed blinds. “What time is it?” she asked in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “About six. Do you see him?” Peter said. His clock had stopped—the glass smashed, one of the hands bent—at about twenty after five.

  She shook her head in a pantomime of despair. Then, coming away from the window: “It’s possible that he’s already in the building. He won’t take no for an answer, Peter; he really means it, that’s the thing: he really means it. He insists that I’m really in love with him.”

  “You have to make it clear to him how you feel.”

  “Would you want the truth if you were in his place?”

  Peter leaned
forward on the bed, imagined himself in Harry’s place, which was not hard to do. “Yes and no,” he conceded.

  “That’s no answer.”

  He leaned his head against the wall, exhausted, deceived. “I can’t speak for Harry,” he said. “I don’t know him. I’ve never met him.”

  “I don’t love you,” she said.

  Peter raised his head, startled into memory. Grief visited his chest, knew his wounds. For no reason he could understand—indifferent to Helena’s feelings about him—he had to fight to keep from crying. “What does that mean?” he muttered.

  “I was just practicing,” Helena said, looking out the window again.

  Peter wiped his eyes. When he looked up, Helena was staring curiously at him—a pleasure of triumph around the mouth as if in a moment’s comprehension she had reduced him to bite-sized morsels of knowledge. “What …?” he asked.

  Moving toward him, she turned away, swallowing a smile. “You’re nice,” she said softly, her voice nervous, cajoling.

  “No, I’m not,” he said.

  ‘You are. I can tell.” She smiled at him sweetly, stroked his face. He turned away in a rage.

  “Cut it out, huh?”

  “Will you let me stay here? I promise to be good.”

  “No.”

  “Please.” She turned to him again, her eyes making special plea—the promise of incalculable reward.

  He wasn’t interested, though something in him registered the pressure of attraction. Not for him. Among other disabilities—exhaustion, multiple wounds, the self-satisfaction of pity—Peter was suspicious: he suspected Helena of smiling behind the mask of desperation she wore on her face. He trusted no one. It had been a long day—none longer since last week—and he wanted, if he wanted anything, a night of painless sleep (a week of sleep would not be too much), though he thought also of calling Dr. Cantor—he had questions to ask—and of going back to Gloria and, maybe in a day or so, of leaving New York, just for a vacation, just to get away from … where he was.