A Man to Conjure With

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “Are you going too?” Lois asked him when Patton had gone, an edge of belligerence in her voice.

  “It’s getting late,” Peter said, moving around in the semi-dark living room as if he were lost. “It was a good dinner,” he said, sorry for her. “It reminded me of dinner.”

  Lois murmured something that sounded like “what did he say to you.”

  “What?”

  “Forget it,” she said. “Sit down if you’re staying, for God’s sake. Why are you wandering around?”

  “Who’s wandering?” he said. “It’s so dark in here I can’t find a chair.”

  “You’re not being funny,” she said, sitting down on the sofa. “Are you trying to be funny?”

  He wasn’t and he was. Trying. “Why did you lie to him?” he asked.

  She made a small noise of acknowledgment, an intake of breath—resigned to accepting what she already knew. “Did you overhear everything?”

  Everything? Peter sat down—collapsed rather than sat—and turned on the lamp next to his chair. It was a three-way light, which he turned up to high, illuminating by degrees the entire room—the shadows like creatures moving up the wall. The light ghostly like a presence.

  Lois had her hands over her face. “I have a headache,” she said in a small voice. “Do you really need all that light?”

  He turned it off, the shadows returning, the room darker than before. Why was he staying? he asked himself. Was it out of a duty to the past? He recalled Herbie’s long-standing admonition, good for all occasions: Don’t get caught with your fly unbuttoned (Herbie, who had ended up an insurance agent in Los Angeles, married, with a child). And other times: It’s in your best interest not to give a shit, kid. Look out for number one. Through his adolescence, until he thought he knew better, Peter had believed implicitly in the underlying wisdom of Herbie’s advice, though he had never quite understood (did he now?) its practical application. As the doctor had said, compromise is sanity, but he had walked out—the doctor had (uncompromised?)—while Peter remained.

  “Why is everything so difficult?” Lois asked, the question addressed to the darkness; also, but secondly, to Peter.

  Peter didn’t know why, had begun to believe that everything—that was the difficulty—was too easy. Sitting there in the almost-dark, the only light from a small Japanese paper lamp, a firefly’s dying glow, Peter had the feeling that he was in his own place (the basement apartment?), that Lois was his wife, that nothing had changed. For a moment, in the spell of memory, he held the past. Then Lois was saying, “Peter, I lied because I thought I could get away with it. I’ve never told the truth in my life when I didn’t have to. You know that.”

  He didn’t give a shit, practiced not caring, worried about number one.

  “I’m not sorry about Oscar,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference, does it? Between us?” “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. It doesn’t, does it?” Against a resolve to give up smoking, she took a cigarette from a pack on the coffee table, lit it in a hurry, took two long puffs, then put it out. “Forget it,” she said. “You don’t have to answer.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  Peter got to his feet like a man coming up from under water. “Lois,” he said hesitantly—hard to talk to someone you couldn’t see, Lois’s face turned away, veiled in shadow, “I’m going now, Lois. Good night. I’m going.”

  When she didn’t answer he approached the couch. “Good night,” he said again, then added, to show her that everything was all right (even if it wasn’t), “I’d like you to meet my son when he comes.”

  “Aren’t you afraid that I’ll seduce him?” she said.

  Peter got his coat from the closet.

  “You don’t have to go,” she said softly, “if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to go, but I think I should,” he said, putting on his coat, a new one with exaggeratedly natural shoulders that Lois had picked out for him. (He wore it, still unused to it, like a responsibility.)

  “Why should you?”

  “Now you sound like Patton.” Standing with his coat on in the middle of the room, he procrastinated, fought temptation for its own sake.

  “And who do you sound like, Peter?” she said, as if she had him there. “Anyway, I doubt that I’ll see Oscar again after tonight. In his undemonstrative way, he was really angry when he left.” She laughed sadly at the memory. “Will I see you again?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re still friends?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re very noncommittal, aren’t you? Are you disturbed about Bob calling after eleven like that?”

  “A little,” he admitted, giving that much away, next to the couch now, hovering over her, logy with depression—his lethargy like a weight on his chest.

  “Don’t be disturbed,” she said gently. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “All right,” he said abruptly, the irony implied. Then he said good night again, not moving, sweating under the weight of his coat. What was he waiting for? (He unbuttoned the coat.)

  “Are you disappointed in me?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said immediately, disappointed that she had asked. He planned to leave in the next minute, took a step toward the door in preparation.

  “Why don’t you take off your coat?” she said, kicking off her shoes, putting her feet up on the couch.

  “I’m leaving in a minute,” he said. Still, he was curious, felt compelled to know what he didn’t want to know. “What’s your relationship with Bob Grimes?” he asked.

  “I knew you were going to ask that, Peter,” she said, pleased at seeing into him. “You haven’t changed as much as you think.” Her pleasure was too fragile to last. “Whatever I tell you,” she said bitterly, “you probably won’t believe me. You never believe anything I tell you.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said. He took another step toward the door, edging his way; yet something held him, some dim quest. “I believe what you tell me,” he said.

  “You’re treating me very badly,” she said in a hurt voice. “Do you mean to?”

  Guilty, he returned begrudgingly to the sofa; Lois, moving over, made room for him next to her. He took off his coat. “I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, touching her arm. Lois lit a cigarette. They sat for a while without talking, only remotely aware of each other, out of time, as in the frozen moment of a dream. Like old times. Lois was crying. “I’m cold,” she whispered. What was expected of him? He covered her with his coat.

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa,” Lois said. “All right? You can have the bed. I’m very shaky, Peter.” She held her hand up to the light to show him. “I’m afraid to be alone.”

  Peter said he would stay—how could he refuse her?—but on condition that she take the bed and he the sofa.

  They argued briefly over who would have the bed, who the sofa, Peter winning. The sofa. “You’re a man to conjure with,” she said. Old times? Lois poured them both a brandy as a nightcap; Peter drank his dutifully, as though it were good for him.

  “Tonight proves,” Lois said, “that Patton’s notions about you were all wrong.”

  He felt compromised by her compliment. “Wrong in what way?” he wanted to know.

  Lois smiled enigmatically, blotted her eyes with a Kleenex, blew her nose. “I’m happy,” she said, as though it were an answer to his question. “Whenever you want to go to bed, Peter, let me know and I’ll make up the sofa for you.”

  “How about now?” he said, yawning, afraid—anticipating the probability—of not being able to sleep.

  “Fine,” she said, but made no move to get up, her legs curled under her, firmly established on the sofa.

  Sitting next to her, Peter had the notion—what could be clearer?—that whatever the prose between them, the formal self-disguises, they would end up in the same bed. And though he didn’t know why—what difference would
it make?—he didn’t want it to happen. Sitting next to Lois on the sofa, her perfume not the one he remembered, he presumed himself without desire. Traces of memory, scenes of love-making he recalled, stung him with nostalgia, but that was something else—not desire. Not love. What did he want from her? What? He wanted—nothing else—to make whole the broken parts of his life, to salvage the failures of the past. And Lois, who had been the deepest of his commitments, had been his greatest failure. He owed her the most of himself. But he wondered—there was no charge for wondering—whether the Lois next to him, so different from his memory of her, was the same Lois he had been married to, in love with, fifteen years before. As a matter of fact she could be no other, but he had yet to discover it for himself. In the secret places where it mattered. He was waiting. Was that compromise? The new Becker, he liked to believe, wanted even more than the old.

  And Lois? What did she want from him?

  At the moment, she wanted mostly to talk.

  “I think we ought to go to bed,” Peter said after a while, meaning sleep—Lois amused at the slip. “We have to go to work in the morning.”

  “All right,” she said, “but who’s sounding like Oscar now?” She continued to sit.

  Peter got impatient waiting. “I’m very tired,” he said, in case she had forgotten.

  She laughed at him. “You’ve really changed, Peter,” she said. “When you were younger you didn’t worry about missing a night of sleep. There was a time we stayed up all night together. Do you remember?”

  He didn’t quite, but he recalled vaguely a night they had spent together before their marriage during which—impossible to sleep then with her next to him—they made love almost, it seemed, without stopping until morning. Was that what she had in mind? he wondered. It seemed inconceivable now that he had ever felt so strongly about her, though he knew he had—the recollection itself like a fever. While he was remembering—ashamed of being beaten by his former self—Lois brought sheets, pillow, a pink blanket from the closet, and made the sofa (a Castro Convertible: so easy even a child-woman could open it) into a bed. Peter stood by and watched. Who needed sleep? You waste, sleeping, lying in bed trying to sleep, a third of your life. As a kid, he used to test himself to see how long he could stay awake. At nineteen, he once went five and a half days without sleep, but then got sick afterward and spent a week in bed recuperating—the price of victory.

  “Look,” he said when Lois had finished with the bed, “if you want to talk some more, I’m not really tired.” Stifling a yawn.

  “Whoever thought you were tired?” she said, kissing him on his cheek. “Good night. See you in the morning, old Peter.” He stood stiffly, acknowledged her affection with a hand shake, wanting to avoid if he could the inevitable. And then, without further ceremony, Lois went to her room—it took him a moment to realize that she had gone. (So much for his presumptions!)

  Peter took off his shoes and socks, and before he knew it—wondering what she wanted from him (what could it be?)—he was asleep. In a dream, he met Lois unexpectedly in the bedroom of their old basement apartment-—each had come back after all these years, not knowing what to expect, on a nostalgic impulse. The room looked about the same, the walls, newly painted, a slightly darker shade of green—the scars, pockmarks, grease stains all there, preserved by the paint. Lois, in a black dress, a black hat with a veil, looked fine—lovely. They were sitting on the edge of their double bed, on a lump of mattress, solemnly silent, their hands connecting them. Peter wanted to lift the veil to see her face, but Lois said, “No, please. My mother will be here any minute.” Her fingers moved between his, the promise of love in their touch. “Where can we go?” he wanted to know, Lois irresistible beneath the shadow of the veil. Lois shook her head. “Where can we go?” she lamented—in mourning, it seemed, for both of them. Then she kissed him, the veil between them, her breath warm, silken. Love lolled on his tongue like a sip of schnapps. “This time, Lois,” he said, “this time it will be different—I won’t make the same mistakes. I’ve learned a little in fourteen years—not much, a little.” Lois on her back now, her knees up. “Quickly,” she said, “quickly, before my mother gets here and I have to clean the house.” It unnerved him. “Lois,” he said, “all these years and I still love you.” “You talk too much,” she said, opening his pants. “Hurry, for God’s sake.” He tried to lift her veil but he couldn’t reach it—important for him to see her face. “Why are you wasting so much time?” she said. “We only have a few minutes left.” Then, in a soft, yearning voice: “Come home, old Peter. Take me. Come home.” He lifted the veil.

  He awoke, tangled in a sheet, the pink blanket on the floor, defrauded by his dream. It was still dark. The naked light of early morning filtering in like dust from the other side of the room. Peter stared at his watch, but he couldn’t quite make out the time—his eyes, he discovered, not yet open. Nagged by a lingering sense of his dream, flying an erection like an American flag on a national holiday, Peter tried, without much luck, to go back to sleep. What was there to do? What else?

  After a few minutes of deliberation—what the hell!—he knocked on Lois’s door. When there was no answer he knocked again—a little harder this time. He heard Lois stirring—desire quickened by anticipation. He knocked again, shaking the door.

  “Who’s that?” she called, her voice tremulous.

  “It’s me. Peter.” He opened the door to show her that it was all right.

  “What do you want, Peter?” she said in a child’s voice, hidden by the covers, a tangle of hair the only sign of her. “What time is it?”

  “I had a dream about you,” he said, feverish—for all he knew, still dreaming.

  “Uh huh.” A noise of acknowledgment. “I sleeping, Peter.”

  Leaning over her, he kissed the top of her head, a strand of hair coming off in his mouth. She murmured something in her sleep.

  His feet were getting cold and he thought of climbing into bed with her to warm them. He called her name instead, his patience killing him.

  She sat up abruptly, looked at him with one eye. “Peter? It you? You frightened me.”

  “Sorry. I had a dream about you, Lois, and I wanted …” He saw now that it was a mistake. (The woman in his dream had been someone else.)

  She reached out as if to touch his face, but then absently withdrew her hand. “I’m not awake yet,” she said, staring ahead of her without the focus of sight, possessed by the memory of sleep. “Was the sofa uncomfortable for you?” she asked after a moment. “I’ll be glad to change with you. As soon as I have the strength to get up.”

  He bent forward and kissed her, her mouth closed, indifferent. “I wanted to kiss you,” he said.

  “You have,” she said, lying back with a smile, closing her eyes. “I’ll see you in the morning. Have lovely dreams.”

  Lovely dreams he didn’t need. But he said good night to her again—what else?—then hung on a few minutes, watching Lois curl like an unborn child into the protection of her covers.

  His first idea when he got back to the living room was to put on his socks and shoes, find his coat, and go home. He got as far as his left sock, tearing a hole in the heel, when he decided in the lethargy of depression—he would have to wait a half-hour for a train if he went now—that he might just as well go back to sleep. His watch, he took the trouble to notice, had twenty minutes after five. He covered himself with a sheet—his left sock still on—and closed his eyes. When he looked at his watch again, it was twenty-three after five. He sat up, tense with exhaustion, enraged at himself. He had misjudged Lois, misconceived what she wanted of him, taken pity for something more. A talent he had, it seemed to him, for not seeing what was there to be seen. Patton was a joker. Perfectionist? It was a joke. No one had further to go than Peter Becker. All he wanted to be was a little competent in his life, a little wise, a little decent, a little brave, to be loved and admired by his son, by Lois, by Diane, by others, to be able to love, to tell a funny joke
every once in a while. And a few other things, odds and ends, immortality. Not much. It was better, when you had a tendency to be anxious like Peter Becker, not to think about the things you wanted; in fact, it was better still not to want them. But how could you change human nature?

  Peter had one shoe on, was putting on the other, when Lois called to him from her room.

  He didn’t answer at first, planned, if he could stick it out, not to answer. Lois’s door opened. “Peter?”

  “Yeah,” he conceded.

  “I was afraid you had gone. I thought I heard the door slam.” She stood in the doorway of her room, frail in a white nightgown, her hair in a thick braid down her back. “It was probably a dream.”

  “I’m still here,” he said.

  “I know that,” she said. “I can see that you’re still here.”

  He waited for her to say something about his shoes being on—a little guilty about it, a little nervous—but she seemed not to notice, or if she did, she chose for some reason to ignore it.

  “Thank you for staying,” she said gratefully. She blew him a kiss, whispered something unintelligible (love you, it sounded like—ah, the vanity of not hearing!), then she disappeared into her room, the door closing soundlessly behind her.

  After that he went back to bed—with his shoes on—and in no time was on the way to falling asleep. As he dozed he heard the sound of a siren outside; it was either the end of the world, he decided, or a fire somewhere, but he was asleep before he had time to worry about it, dreaming. He had lovely dreams. And when he awoke there was a woman in bed next to him. He had only to reach over and touch her to know who it was. He didn’t forget much.

  | 3 |

  They were having breakfast. “Why the hell don’t we get married again,” he said to Lois.

  “Why don’t we?” she said, buttering a piece of toast.