The Pavilion of Former Wives

by Jonathan Baumbach

  The above is what she told her closest confidant, Marcia A., needing to talk to someone other than herself, but that was before she had begun to suspect that Marcia was the one (or might well have been) her husband was seeing on the sly. The thing with suspicions is that, once you give way to them, they tend to occupy you like an infectious rash. “That’s your guilt talking, honey,” Marcia had said to her. “You can’t put too much stock in anything your guilt tells you. You know that as well as I do.”

  “And what do I have to be guilty about?”

  “What does anyone have to be guilty about,” she said. “I only know what you told me.”

  WHAT JULIA TOLD MARCIA AFTER MARCIA SAID I HAVEN’T SEEN YOU LOOK THIS HAPPY IN I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG

  It’s hard to talk about this because I don’t understand it myself. I ran into someone at the AWP conference in Boulder, someone I once knew and hadn’t seen in ages. Look, this is not to be repeated to anyone. To no one. Okay? You know, or maybe you don’t, that I did a poetry writing MFA at Stanford in the seventies. I suppose everyone that goes into publishing saw herself in college as some kind of poet or story writer. Anyway, it was in my last quarter at Stanford that I got involved with one of my teachers. He was my instructor in a course in the metaphysical poets and was, not the least of his attractions, a poet himself. We got on very well, maybe too well, considering that he was married. I don’t even remember how it started, but almost every afternoon we used to meet at my apartment and read poems to each other, mostly other people’s, sometimes our own. We also made love, but I really think it was the reading of the poems back and forth that was our most indelible connection. I loved the way he read. He had unusual phrasing and he had this melodious voice. He was also very smart without being pretentious about it. I remember being impressed that he refused to call himself a poet even though he was publishing his work in prestigious places. He merely said that he wrote poems. I liked that about him. At the end of the spring quarter—this was something like thirty-one years ago, so my memory is vague on particulars—we separated while still being emotionally attached. I went to Paris, which had been an arranged thing long before we got together, and he took a job somewhere in the east, at Tufts I think it was, and that was it. We never saw each other again. That is, we never saw each other again until a week ago in Boulder, Colorado.

  I never got to his reading, which I had checked off in the program listings as something I planned to attend—missed it accidentally on purpose, I suppose, by remembering the date wrong. I thought with a mix of regret and relief that I had avoided him, but he showed up at my event and came forward after my talk to present himself. He seemed greatly altered, not like an older self but like someone else altogether. I didn’t recognize him when he came up to say hello, though I had the sense that I knew this man from somewhere. I was trying and failing to figure out from where so I missed much of what he was saying. He had affected a kind of scruffy style that I tend to find obnoxious, three days of beard, abbreviated ponytail—I think they call it a rattail—the bags under his eyes an advertisement for the romance of sleeplessness. And he was thicker, slightly stooped, with a modest paunch that said he had more important things to do with his time than keep fit—the phrase that came to mind was pregnant with self-importance—so that he looked every bit his age and then some. It was when he asked me, something in the voice, if I would have a cup of coffee with him that I realized who he was. Of course I already knew he was at the conference, but the image I had of him in my head was the long-lost, mostly forgotten version of him that in another lifetime I imagined I loved. It’s possible that I had even seen a picture somewhere. On the back of his first book, possibly. I don’t remember saying yes to his invitation, but as he had assumed my acceptance I saw no reason to disappoint. Thirty-one years had passed without a word between us. It was time to catch up, and surely there was a lot to catch up on.

  So there we were, sitting across from each other in the Boulder cafeteria, making small talk with a kind of unearned ease that unsettled me. This time I was the married one and he wasn’t, though he had three failed marriages to put on the table for my consideration. I was relieved at how painless it all seemed, and then he announced, forty-five minutes or so into our conversation, that he tended to think of me as “the great love of his life.”

  “No,” I said, not because I didn’t believe he meant it, but because I had once fantasized this very conversation and had, at some cost, willfully outgrown it.

  And if his first confession wasn’t offensive enough, he added, “For long periods I don’t think of you at all, but when I do, it’s always with regret at having lost you.”

  I got out of my seat in a hurry and stormed off. He caught up with me in the hallway outside of the cafeteria and apologized. I can’t say why, but I put my arms around him then and we stood there— people walked around us to get by—holding onto each other. “No,” I said again, this time in a whisper, though I continued holding on. “I hate your rattail,” I told him, “and why the hell don’t you shave like everyone else.”

  “Let’s go sit in my car,” he said, and I made an uncharacteristic noise that was meant as a laugh though failed its intention.

  Instead of going to his car, which was a half-mile walk as it turned out, I went with him to his hotel room. It wasn’t what you think. He was gentlemanly to a fault. We didn’t touch in the hotel room but sat notably apart reminiscing—our memories often at odds—on what went on between us at Stanford. I made the mistake of confessing that I would have cancelled the Paris trip had he asked me to. “I thought of it,” he said, “but I couldn’t. I think you understand.”

  “I didn’t understand any of it,” I said. And I still don’t.

  I returned to my hotel room that night to sleep and didn’t, replaying our various conversations in my head, past and present. It was only after I resolved not to see him again that I fell asleep. Somehow we had breakfast together—I may have phoned him—and we spent almost all our uncommitted time in each other’s company for the next two days, but that’s as far as it went.

  My flight was earlier and he waited with me at my gate and then gave me his card, which had his e-mail address. I gave him my e-mail on the back of a cocktail napkin. His parting words, which of course I remember, were: “Is it possible, Julia, that we’re making the same mistake all over again?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a mistake the first time,” I said.

  “Really I have nothing to feel guilty about. I almost wish I had. Nothing happened. I told you nothing happened. Why would I lie?”

  “Obviously something happened,” Marcia said. “Sex isn’t the only currency between lovers. You know that.”

  “All right, nostalgia happened, but why should feelings of guilt come into play? I did nothing wrong. And I still don’t think my suspicions about Henry have anything to do with my brief encounter with this man.”

  “You can’t even say his name, for God’s sake. Is it a name I would recognize?”

  “I don’t think so, though it’s possible. He’s published a book of stories and three or four volumes of poems, though nothing in the last eight years.”

  “Do you appear in any of his work?”

  “No…I don’t really know. I’ve read very little of his work.”

  “You weren’t curious?”

  “Look, I don’t know. I just didn’t think about it.”

  “And why do I find that hard to believe? Do you want to know why I think you avoided reading him?”

  He was coming to New York to see his daughter and he asked her if he could meet up with her while he was in town. She didn’t see why not, or rather she did see why not but decided finally that it was better to see him than to avoid him. By denying him she had been holding onto him, or at least that’s what Marcia seemed to think. So it followed that by not denying him, by spending time with him, she could get rid of whatever tenuous ties continued to bind them. Her goal, as she saw it, was to exorcise his gho
st and perhaps at the same time, with any luck, keep him as a friend.

  When she saw him waiting for her at Sixty-Fourth and Fifth, looking off in the opposite direction (she had been uncharacteristically late), she was thinking of how she would describe her first impression of him on approaching. The man waiting for me was not the one I was expecting to meet, she would say to Marcia. He was an imposter, someone who had stolen my former friend’s identity. I had seen him as this older self in Boulder, but I nevertheless expected to see a considerably younger man waiting for me. Then he turned around. He turned around before I actually reached him and looked at me as if my being there surprised him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I didn’t expect you,” he said.

  “I said I would meet you,” I said. “Who were you waiting for if not me?”

  “Should we walk along,” he said, “or would you rather sit on a bench?”

  Always decisions to be made. “I don’t care,” I said. “We can walk if that’s what you want.”

  Though he seemed frail, he took long strides and I had to struggle to keep up. The wind swallowed whatever we tried to say to each other, which wasn’t much. Anyway, it was hard to talk while walking as quickly as we were. At some point, a somewhat younger woman, coming the other way, called to him. I thought it must be his daughter but it turned out to be a former wife, which was not an altogether pleasant surprise. They talked a few minutes as if I were invisible and then she went on and we continued, though I found myself unreasonably angry at him.

  “I’m through walking,” I said.

  “Do you want to sit down somewhere?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “That line you gave me about being the great love of your life. I don’t think so.”

  “I wasn’t lying,” he said. “If it offended you, I take it back.”

  His taking it back of course made things worse and I said some things that may have overstated what I actually felt. I gave him this tongue-lashing, called him a gigolo, accused him of issuing false compliments as a form of control, said he was the worst kind of woman abuser because he kept his hands to himself, and it kept getting worse until he said, “Please shut up.”

  Julia felt so bad she ended up apologizing to him, and they made up or at least went through the motions of reconciling before separating. She was sure that after her jealous rant he’d be more than happy never to see her again.

  Nevertheless, he sent her an e-mail the day after he returned to Newton, which included the draft of a poem he was working on. At first she thought it was about her—why else would he send it?— which seemed consistent with his presumptuous stance in regard to her. On second reading, she saw that it was not about her at all, which in its own way was even more bothersome. And then she wasn’t sure whether she liked the poem sufficiently to offer an opinion, not wanting to say anything she didn’t feel. So rather than comment on the poem, she thanked him for showing it to her and sent back in exchange one of her own, one of her more recent efforts, something she had completed or stopped fussing with about five months ago.

  The next day her poem made a return visit with a few suggested changes in italics under the original lines while making a meal out of how much the sender admired its sensibility. She accepted two of his five suggestions, made a few changes of her own (inspired by his critique), and, against her better judgment, e-mailed him the revised version. She had no idea what to expect, appropriate silence most likely, and was happily surprised to find a message from him the next time she checked. “Julia, it’s terrific,” he wrote, while making one further emendation, “and I hope you’ll forgive me my unsolicited suggestions. It’s what I do and it’s a difficult habit to break.”

  Perhaps she was half kidding when she wrote back in apparent dudgeon, “If you’re trying to seduce me with false flattery, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  A day and a night passed before she got an answer to that one. “False flattery was genuine,” it said. “And what gave you the idea I was trying to seduce you?”

  “I’m glad you like the poem, along with the sensibility,” she wrote back. “Your comments were helpful to me.” She thought it best to let the seduction issue die of its own accord.

  A twice-weekly e-mail correspondence followed, a period in which Henry’s presumed transgressions seemed increasingly provocative.

  One Thursday, an hour after Henry had left for the gym, she called Marcia, who had gradually emerged as Julia’s prime suspect. Marcia answered, seemed uneasy, said she couldn’t talk at the moment and would call back later, which provided Julia with the evidence she had told herself she wasn’t looking for.

  To avoid obsessing about Henry and Marcia, and not wanting to concede any more of her life to the time-killing distraction of TV, she decided to phone the man she had e-mailed a new poem to that very morning.

  He picked up on the fourth ring and seemed, this professed devotee, not to recognize her voice. She had identified herself as “me,” assuming (and why wouldn’t she?), given the intimacy of their dialogues, that “It’s me” was sufficient calling card.

  He was discreet enough not to ask who “me” might be, hoping, she assumed, he would figure it out along the way. Betrayed on all sides, she resolved to give him no help. Several minutes into the conversation she said, “You don’t know who this is, do you?” But saying that in just the way she said it—she listened to its echo—was a tipoff in itself.

  “I’d know you anywhere,” he said

  “Right,” she said, laughing without amusement. “You still haven’t called me by my name.”

  “I thought the point was, we didn’t use names,” he said. “You never call me by my name.”

  It was true that she didn’t. “That’s because you’re an imposter,” she said. The silence on the other end troubled her. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out,” she said, as close to an apology as she could get without humiliating herself.

  “I am an imposter,” he said, “but you weren’t supposed to know that.”

  “It takes one to know one,” she said.

  “Look, I haven’t read your poem yet,” he said. “I was just about to pick it up, really I was, when you called to check up on me.”

  “I called because I wanted to hear your voice,” she said. “I don’t mind that you haven’t gotten to my poem, but if you love my work, as you say, I’d think you’d want to read it as soon as it arrived.”

  “I wanted to clear my head before looking at it. You might say I’ve been saving it in the way a child saves a favorite food for last.”

  “What a sweet thing to say,” she said. “Would you tell me if in fact you didn’t like my poem?”

  “Since I tend to like what you do a great deal, there’s virtually no chance of that. I will tell you if I think your poem needs work. Does that satisfy your question?”

  “It might,” she said. “We’ll see.”

  “Why are you so distrusting?”

  “Is that what I am? I might ask in return, why all the extravagant compliments?”

  “I’m not aware of what you’re referring to. You seem to think that I’m insincere, which is certainly unflattering to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, regretting the apology, which seemed to have made its way on automatic pilot. “I think the problem is that, whatever else is going on between us, we don’t know each other well enough to have the conversations we’ve been having.”

  “Of course we do,” he said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be having them, would we? Where’s your husband?”

  “He’ll be back in about thirty minutes. This is his extracurricular night out.”

  “His what? What are you telling me?”

  “It’s just an idle suspicion. Henry is a good man.”

  “I believe he is,” he said. “You wouldn’t have married him if he wasn’t. You wouldn’t have stayed with him this long if he wasn’t a good man.”

  “Come on,” she said. “I’m not as perfec
t as you pretend to think I am. I’ve been known on occasion to make mistakes. Particularly, you might say, where men are concerned, I’ve been wrong once or twice.”

  “Sometimes good men also cheat on their wives.”

  She heard herself laugh while not being especially amused. “Are you talking about yourself now?”

  “I’ll take the fifth on that one,” he said. “It’s hard, I know from personal experience, to carry around unprovable suspicions concerning people you’re close to. I’m sorry.”

  “My friend, Marcia, thinks it’s all your fault.”

  “My fault? How so?”

  “You should know,” she said. “I thought you understood me better than that. Marcia thinks it’s because I feel guilty about meeting you that I’ve taken it into my head that Henry is having a fling.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “In my worst moments, I believe it’s Marcia that he’s seeing. At other times, at the same time sometimes, I think I’m probably wrong about that.”

  “What do you believe at this moment?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know.”

  “At this moment, I believe he’s in bed with Marcia even as we speak. I’d like to drop the subject now…. Actually, I hear his key in the door, so I’ll get off. Bye.”

  He hung up without a word, or perhaps she had cut him off. She had called to suggest that they meet again, perhaps in the Boston area this time around, but it had never gotten said. And besides, she would have to get an assignment from the magazine to make such a trip possible without having to lie to Henry or, which would be even more difficult, having to tell him the truth.

  Marcia called her at work to ask if they could meet for lunch. “The reason I didn’t get back to you last night was that a friend was over. Someone I had met in an elevator of all places.”