A Man to Conjure With

by Jonathan Baumbach

“I’m putting myself completely in your hands,” he said, a conscious attempt at avoiding irony. “Any way you want to rehabilitate me is just fine with me.”

  “Don’t be a bastard.” She whispered it.

  The operator interrupted: “Five cents for the next three minutes.”

  “You misunderstand me,” he said. He scavenged in his pocket for a nickel and came up with a subway token, lint, and three pennies.

  “It’s not hard to misunderstand you,” she said gently. “Should I tell Bob that you’re not interested in the job?”

  “Do you want me to take it?”

  “Give me your number, Peter. I’ll call you back.”

  “I appreciate this, Lois.” A heavy click. “Lois?”

  A dial tone, the death of a connection between them.

  He told a woman at the bar what it was like to be a forest ranger. “My job was mostly going around on a horse from place to place counting deer pellets,” he explained. “And this horse they gave me kept throwing me and running away. Sometimes I would lose a whole day just trying to find my horse.”

  “That’s very interesting,” she said, and she might even have meant it.

  When he called Lois back—an hour and three Scotches later—some girl (her secretary?) told him that Lois was out for lunch, and would he care to leave a message? His speech a bit thick, he asked the girl, whoever she was—he liked the sound of her voice—if she would have lunch with him, since both of them seemed to be free at the moment. The girl thanked him, said she was sorry—even sounded sorry—that she had already been out for lunch. Another time.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. Then, sobering some: “You don’t have to answer.”

  “Diane,” she said. “Why should I mind answering?”

  He hardly remembered the rest of the conversation, but a few minutes after he had hung up it struck him that he had made an appointment to have a drink with the girl. What was he—out of his mind? If he wanted Lois back—why else had he returned to New York?—he had no business making dates with girls who worked in her office, even if it was innocent. Avoid rashness, he warned himself, and had another drink. Avoid innocence.

  He left the bar at three o’clock in full control of one or two small areas of himself, and went about the cosmic business of killing the rest of the day. Time hardly moved, but he wasn’t around much to notice it. Tomorrow, he promised himself, tomorrow he would start fresh.

  And the next day, no longer tomorrow, he did. It was a surprise even to himself. He started fresh. He woke early, only a little hung-over, shaved, dressed, and with uncharacteristic efficiency found a place to live: a semifurnished two-room apartment on West Seventy-third Street, at only (a bargain in New York) eighty-nine fifty a month, tsouris extra. Paying the rent—two months in advance—left him very nearly broke. (Thirty-seven dollars between Peter and his last fifty cents.) To his surprise he didn’t worry about it; yet a part of him, a remnant of the old Becker, was a little nervous.

  Why begrudge the spirit a little pleasure between pains? They had lunch together, Peter and Lois, like old times, at a tea-housey Swedish restaurant on Lexington Avenue. Lois indulged him with smiles.

  “I still resent you,” she said between sips of her coffee. “Do you think it’s love?” She smiled brilliantly, the remoteness of her eyes belying the guile of her charm. It was merely talk, and also, despite itself, meant.

  Still, he had trouble recognizing her. “I think it’s resentment,” he said. “Does this guy, Grims, Grimes—what’s his name?—does he know that you used to be married to me?”

  “His name is Bob Grimes,” she said in an instructive voice. “I don’t think there’s anything to be gained in mentioning it, Peter. It’s not relevant, really. Is it? It’s just not relevant. You understand.” She smiled sheepishly, aware of her own game, aware that he was aware—her vanity a denial of itself.

  He played along. “Is this guy Grimes interested in you?” The waitress, in a loose-fitting peasant blouse, a big Dutch-looking girl, bent over to clear the table. Peter couldn’t help noticing the ripeness of her breasts. He turned guiltily to Lois, discovered lines under her eyes, new ones.

  “Are you jealous?” she asked.

  He clowned, looking over his shoulder—a tray of Swedish cakes on the table behind him. “Who me?” he protested. “Who me—jealous? Why should I be jealous?”

  She laughed with more pain than pleasure.

  “I am jealous,” he said softly.

  She turned away. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  She lit a cigarette, her hand tremulous. “You know what I’m talking about. Peter, I want peace and quiet. I need peace and quiet.”

  He nodded.

  “The truth is, I don’t love you any more,” she said matter-of-factly, her eyes averted. “It took me a long time to get over you; I was really neurotic about it, but it’s been done and I don’t want it undone. You understand.”

  “All right.” What else could he say?

  “Do you mean it?” An anguished smile, an attempt at a laugh. “I think you’re humoring me. Are you?” She stubbed out her cigarette murderously, as though she had a grudge against it. “Oscar has the idea that you’ve come back to New York—I told him it wasn’t true—because you think there’s a possibility of us getting together again.” She played with her napkin, embarrassed. “You don’t think that, do you?”

  Peter glanced at Lois, her face fretted by uncharted fears, and found her (as never before) unattractive, curiously ugly. It was the light. When she turned to him, forcing a shy, broken smile, her face was lovely again. “You look very nice,” he said.

  She shrugged, a girl again in her recollection of herself, embarrassed and pleased at the compliment. “I was much prettier when I was young,” she said wistfully.

  They fought over the check, Peter winning an anxious victory—guilt the impulse of his pride.

  As they got up from the table, Lois took a five-dollar bill out of her wallet and slipped it into his hand. He gave it back to her.

  “Please,” she insisted, pushing the money surreptitiously, as if he couldn’t feel what she was doing, into a side pocket of his jacket.

  He paid for the lunch with his own money, with as much grace as he could muster—Lois’s five-dollar bill weighing in his pocket like a stone.

  Outside, Lois, her hand lightly on his arm, rewarded him with a smile. “When you get the job,” she consoled him, stroked the indifference of his pride, “you’ll take me out to lunch. Okay?”

  He gave her back the five dollars, slipping it into the warm pocket of her coat, a lingering gesture, an unintended intimacy. Coming out, his hand was bruised by the cold. He rubbed his hands together.

  “Is that the way you want it?” she said.

  “I like to show a girl a good time,” he said. “That’s the kind a guy I am.”

  “You’re a clown,” she said.

  He bowed for his audience, did a dance step, a slow shuffle. Lois looked embarrassed.

  They walked together back to Whartons Associates, Lois in a hurry—a slow, cold rain, a misty veil of rain impeding their progress.

  “Remember,” she said at the entrance to the building, as if he were a small boy she were sending off to camp, “your appointment with Bob is for three o’clock. It’s twenty to three now. You don’t have a watch, so don’t go too far away.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  They shook hands. “Good luck,” she whispered. “Call me and tell me how you make out.”

  He said he would. “Just be yourself,” she called back.

  He waved. It was like old times, only different.

  Alone, himself, in no mood to be interviewed, he had the urge to flee. Patience, counseled the new Becker. You’re winning. It only feels like loss. So he walked around the block a few times to pass the time; the icy rain, stinging his face, confirmed him in the illusion of his existence. Waiting on a corner for the light to change, he tried to r
emember Lois as she was fifteen years ago, but for no reason—a trick of memory—he recalled a delicate, long-haired blond girl of seventeen—she used to ride in his cab—he took her back and forth from school—her name Delilah—she had died. He wiped his eyes, a fool to cry on a busy street corner. All his losses, it seemed at that moment, in the haze of recollection, were one loss—something of himself. And something else: each loss a death, his own. Where was the new Becker when he needed him most? He shook his head in a paroxysm of grief, wondering if it would be possible to close whatever it was he had opened up in himself. The rain in his face seemed his own tears. It struck him then with a sense of discovery, though he had known it for a while, had been keeping it a secret from himself, that he was no longer in love with Lois. The knowledge, a kind of final terror, braced him. There was nothing else to fear, nothing worse. His nerves a fortress of scars. And yet it changed nothing. He vowed he would make it up to Lois if he could. And if he couldn’t? “Who couldn’t?” he said out loud. No one answered. The rain changed to sleet. The man standing next to him, younger and heavier than Peter, looked away.

  | 2 |

  A sometimes wise man, his brother, once advised him: “Don’t sleep when you’re awake.” He tried not to. But his dreams had an astonishing clarity and it always surprised him afterward, when he woke from them, that they had happened, that he had lived through them, when he was to all intents and purposes asleep.

  Peter was sitting at the head (or foot) of a long table in an elegant Victorian restaurant with his father and brother, Diane and Lois, and a few other people he knew only casually. (His son, he was told, would be arriving later.) It was a marvelous restaurant, a waiter like a shadow behind every chair. His father, Morris, suggested a toast: “To Peter, whose courage and generosity has made this evening possible. To Peter, the pride of his family—not many of them still alive—we love you.” He blew his nose. There were cheers. While they were toasting him Peter sneaked a look at his wallet, which was empty except for a crumpled five-dollar bill and two subway tokens. Did they think he was paying for it all—the drinks, the food, the wine, a tremendous amount already consumed, latecomers still arriving? What a mistake they had made! How could it have happened? It had happened—did the world always make sense? Peter waved his hands for silence. There was applause. Herbie winked at him, banged his glass on the table. “Speech.”

  “My friends …” Peter said, searching for words to explain his predicament. More applause. “I have a confession to make.” A roar from the crowd. “I’m not who you think I am.”

  “Sit down,” the fat man next to him said. “We’ve had enough speeches for one night.”

  “There’s been a misunderstanding,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the crowd—everyone talking at once. “I have no money.”

  Lois tugged at his arm. “Please, Peter! Don’t spoil everything.”

  “What can I do? I have no money, and they expect me to pay for all this.”

  The fat man laughed as if he had never been so amused in his life.

  Everyone seemed to be looking in the direction of his dinner plate, Herbie pointing a long finger at it. Knowing smiles, nudges—a secret shared at his expense.

  Dubious, Peter lifted his plate and found, pink on the white tablecloth, a check made out to him for five hundred thousand dollars—he read it twice to make sure—and thirty-six cents. A note clipped to it said: “For services rendered.” There was also a crushed white carnation. Peter looked around; everyone in the room, it seemed, was nodding at him.

  “What’s this for?” he said. “I haven’t done anything to deserve this.”

  “Ohhhhh!” A group disclaimer.

  “Don’t be ungracious,” his father said. “If I told you once, Peter, I’ve told you a thousand times: money is honey. Finders keepers, losers weepers. A bird in the hand …”

  Peter ripped the check in half, then in quarters, then in eighths. “I don’t want what isn’t mine,” he said. He threw the pieces to the wind—a huge exhaust fan at the center of the ceiling attracting them, whirring them about in the air like confetti. Pieces of check floated across the room, landing on tops of heads, in soup, in people’s mouths, eyes. One end of the banquet table collapsed. A white-haired lady was crying. A piece of ceiling fell. Someone screamed, “It’s the Titanic all over again.”

  “What have you done, kid?” Herbie said, shaking his head sadly.

  What had he done?

  He awoke in a sweat, shivering, alone in his own bed, the covers askew. For moments on end, the room still dark, he suffered the dream as though it was a comment on his life, its implications a judgment. But after a while it faded from memory, and though he tried, he was unable to recall its details. Only its outline, the nightmare of his good fortune, remained to keep him awake. Since his return to New York, his life had been going remarkably well, everything (almost) as he wanted it, his luck too good for comfort. Going to sleep was risky when you had something to lose. Even the editing job, which he had had no business getting in the first place, had worked out. After only two months he had been given a substantial raise, more than he deserved. Yet it troubled him that the job took nothing of himself that mattered but his time. It was easy enough, gave him the illusion of achievement (money exchanged hands), made him a living and pleased Lois—what more did he have a right to want? He wanted more—or less. But that wasn’t the best (the worst?) of his luck. His son, Phil, had written to say that he wanted to visit him, was coming to stay with him in New York for the summer as soon as school was out. It worried Peter. Such luck couldn’t be his—a mistake? He looked over his shoulder at the guy in back of him, for whom the luck was obviously meant, hut no one was there. It worried him.

  When he told Lois about his misgivings—an old ex-married couple, they had dinner together two or three times a week—she laughed at him as though he weren’t serious. “You’re out of your mind,” she said, serving him a martini—Peter in Oscar’s chair. “None of this has anything to do with luck.” She sniffed at the word as though it were scatological. “At least three people in the past week have said good things to me about you. You’re good. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “Who’s hard?” he kidded. “The rest of you are too easy.” Yet he had the feeling—a further disappointment in them both—that she had missed the point of his complaint, that he had missed making the point.

  Peter sipped his martini, reacquainted himself with Lois’s face, which had a way of seeming different, seeming actually to change character in different moods of light. Sometimes he thought he was in love with her again—some of her faces he was in love with—but mostly it was something else, the low-flamed affection of people who mourned a common death. They were, in the conventional sense, old friends, or pretended to be. Peter told her about his son, underplaying his anxieties about the visit. “What do you do with a thirteen-year-old boy?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was never a thirteen-year-old boy.” She set the table for dinner, poured another round of martinis.

  “He sounds pretty intelligent from his letter, though he doesn’t spell very well,” Peter said. “They must have bad schools in Ohio. Do you know what really worries me, Lois … I’m afraid that he’ll see through me.”

  Lois nibbled on a nail, smiled. “What will he see?”

  He couldn’t explain. “He’ll see that there’s nothing there.” Depression, like an old friend, hung on his neck.

  “You’re not making any sense,” Lois said. “I can’t bear to listen to you talk this way, Peter.” She got up and went into the kitchen, returning almost immediately. “Sometimes you get me really angry.” She looked around as if to find something she could throw at him. “I know you’ve had some bad times, but you’re not the only one. What gets me so mad is that you’re doing so well now, and you still complain. Accept it. I’ve never known anyone—Oh, let’s eat.”

  They ate like strangers, harboring pr
ivate hurts, their dispute mediated into silence. “I still haven’t given up the notion of teaching,” Peter said, raising his fork, balancing a single pea on the edge of the middle prong. “The trouble is, I don’t know enough to teach. How could I stand up in front of a class? What could I tell them?”

  “If you continue like this, Peter, I’m going to leave. I mean it. Why is it that nothing in the world satisfies you?”

  He shrugged. The question was its own answer.

  She glanced at him shyly, looked away. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “I’d like to see your son’s letter if you have it with you.”

  He took it out of his wallet, and with a curious sense of pride—the author, after all, his son—passed it over to Lois. He watched her nervously, studied her expression as she read, the shadow of a smile on her mouth. Holding the letter to the light—her eyes, slits of themselves, almost touching the page—she read without her glasses. Why? he wondered. For whose benefit?

  “Uh huh,” she said, handing it back.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Uh huh, it’s a nice letter,” she said tonelessly.

  “It’s just a letter,” he said. “There’s no point in making a big deal about it.”

  “It’s just a letter,” she said, “but it’s a nice one. I’m sure he’s a nice boy.” The more she attempted enthusiasm, the colder her voice became—the word “nice” freezing all life for miles around. “What was his mother like?” she asked slyly, sipping her wine. “You know, you’ve never told me anything about her.”

  Peter pretended distraction, studied the spidery lines of a woodcut on the opposite wall—the unadmitted knowledge between them demanding more than either was willing to give. “Nice,” he said. “The print.”

  “Yes.” Lois didn’t ask again, though clearly the question remained in the air, to be reckoned with. She wondered if he had another woman somewhere—that is, a woman—she was only an old friend herself, a former wife. And besides, what could she expect from a man who didn’t answer her questions?