The Other Mr. Bax

by Rodney Jones

  Kate’s voice came from the kitchen—muffled words as vague as Dana’s memories.

  Yes, there was an abundance of issues, though Roland had never run away from them. They’d hack their way through, no matter how exhausting. Everything had to be resolved “now.” But what have we resolved? A soft moan left her throat. You hardly let him speak. And, fuck… you shouldn’t have hung up. She tried to recall a recent fight, but arrived at nothing substantial. Could that be it? He’s been holding back too much?

  She rolled over onto her back and gazed up at the featureless, white ceiling. Again, she heard Kate’s voice rise and fall, and thought she may’ve heard Roland’s name within the mumblings.

  Minutes later, a tap came from the bedroom door.

  “Dana?”

  She sat up. “Yeah?”

  “Roland’s on the phone.” Kate’s voice contained a note of caution. “He wants to talk to you.”

  She huffed. “Come on in.” The door opened. Kate held the phone out toward her, her eyes offering sympathy. She left the room, closing the door gently behind her.

  Dana brought the handset to her ear. “Yeah.”

  “Dana… look, I know everyone’s upset. I am too. I’m—”

  “What do you have to be upset about? You’re the one who left.”

  “Please, can I finish?”

  She let out another huff.

  “This isn’t easy,” he said.

  She took a breath. “Yeah. Whatever. Just fucking say it.”

  A sigh came from over the phone. “Perhaps it’d be better if we had this conversation in person.”

  “No, Roland. I think I’ve waited long enough. Just tell me.”

  “Look, Brian’s offered to get me a ticket to Indianapolis. What if I was to fly to Buffalo, instead? Kate was saying… Well, that doesn’t matter. I think it’s a good idea. We could sort this out together. It’s… I could be there in a few days, maybe.”

  “Oh, you think being left waiting for days for you to come home from a stupid walk, only to realize that you may not be coming home… at all… You think that’s easy? How hard could an explanation be? I don’t want to wait, Roland. I’m sick of waiting.”

  “All right.”

  She watched the particles drifting down unaffected by the tension in the air—mockingly slow and patient.

  “Where do I start?” he said.

  “You’re in Arizona, for crying out loud!”

  “Yes… I am. I live here. I’ve lived here for about five years now. Joyce and I moved here in—”

  “Joyce?”

  “I’ve never been to New York… ever.”

  “Okay, okay… never been to New York. Start with that. What the fuck does that mean? What’s that got to do with us?”

  “New York… the state. I’ve never been there.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you being… What the fuck, Roland?”

  “Look, Dana, I’m not doing anything. I’m just trying to explain. I thought—”

  “But you’re not—”

  “Dana—”

  “Okay, explain… explain, I don’t care… just fuckin’ explain.” She huffed. “God!”

  The phone went quiet for a long moment.

  “Explain it to me,” Dana said.

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  Dana sat at the edge of the bed, her right foot tapping the floor. “How about Saturday? How about you start with last Saturday morning? I left to help mom make pizzas. What’d you do once I left?”

  “Saturday.” He cleared his throat. “That’s when it happened. We got up a little later than usual, had breakfast, then—”

  “You got up later than usual, not me.”

  “I mean Joyce and I. I think it was around 9:30 when—”

  “Stop.”

  “We’d slept in, then went for an early—”

  “Stop, Roland.”

  “All right.” He paused. “You don’t really want to hear it. I understand. I’m curious about something though. Your story. I mean, how did you—?”

  Dana pulled the phone away from her ear and placed the tip of her index finger on the off button. Roland’s voice sounded weak, tinny, and distant coming from the tiny speaker. She could barely make out what he was saying.

  “Dana? You still there? Dana?”

  She brought the phone back to her ear.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Joyce,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The woman you woke up with.”

  “Yeah.”

  Dana gazed toward the portrait hanging on the wall—Roland’s little sister.

  “Like I said, I don’t know what happened… where she is.”

  She waited for him to continue, but he took too long. “That’s nice.”

  “I know it sounds…” He stopped.

  “Roland?”

  “Everything vanished… the house… everything.”

  It was basically what she’d heard before: mixed up realities and whatever. She knew what was next, but let him go on uninterrupted with his annoyingly asinine tale—a parable with no connection to reality. She let him jabber on till it seemed he had exhausted all the pointless details, then waited through another stretch of silence. “That’s it? You’re staying with…”

  “Fred Pinetree.”

  “And your new home… switching places with yourself… alternate egos… and what else? Oh yeah, your new wife is a vampire?”

  “I know.”

  “Roland, we got married in eighty-six. You didn’t marry anyone else. I would’ve noticed. I mean… Jesus.”

  “Do you remember when we met?” he said.

  “You think I’m stupid? Of course I remember. The question is, do you?” She waited for a response, but none came. “Of course I remember. You’re the one with the memory issues.”

  “When was it? What year?”

  She huffed. “I’m being tested now?”

  “Please…”

  “Eighty-three.”

  “The same year…”

  “The same year, what, Roland?”

  “Nancy and I divorced in eighty-three. My first wife.”

  Dana groaned. “Lucky her, she gets remembered. You called me, asked me over for dinner. You told me it was her idea… Nancy’s. But, naturally, you wouldn’t remember that, huh?”

  “Oh…” he said, in a breathy whisper, “yes… yes, I remember now.” He cleared his throat. “Nancy, wanted rid of me. She suggested I call you. You were visiting. You were there for just a few days. Maybe it was a week. But, anyway, she wanted me to call you. I believe she thought that if I got a taste of an affair, she’d be free of me. She was… well… projecting, sort of.”

  Dana knew the story. Roland’s modified account of it, however, was nothing less than grating. “You called me, asked me over for dinner.”

  “No, I didn’t. I almost did. I thought about it—”

  “And this is your new version of our story?”

  “I swear, that’s how I remember it. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s real.”

  “So, you divorced Nancy and then met someone else? Not me? Roland, that doesn’t sound crazy, it is crazy. You most certainly called me, invited me to dinner… and I accepted. It’s not open to interpretation. I came, we… Oh fuck it! Whatever.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Good, that fixes everything.” She drew in a lungful of air, and let it out. “You disappear from here, show up in Arizona… nothing crazy about that.”

  “Well, no… no.” He sighed. “What happened was, I was…” He let out a huff, then went on, stumbling through his feeble account. More than anything else, Dana was baffled by his audacity and persistence. It seemed, at times, that he was mocking her intelligence. He finally finished by saying, “Does that make sense?”

  “No.”

  “Right, I know, I know.”

  A housefly buzzed up and down between the shade and the window pain, banging into the
glass. “So now what? You going to stay there in Arizona, live with your new friends, hunt around for that house that disappeared, and your runaway wife?”

  Another huff came from the phone’s speaker. “I don’t know.” He hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ll probably stay with Brian for a while. Until I can figure something else out.”

  “Roland, why don’t you just come home?”

  “I can’t do that. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “But you just told me…” Dana imagined herself demanding that he stop the bullshit. She didn’t however. She kept her anger in check, though holding it back aggravated the pain behind it all the more. “Okay, Roland. You do whatever you feel like doing.” She was aware of the venom in her voice—aware too that she might later regret it. It was simply too much to contain though. Rushing to end the conversation as amicably as she could, she said, “It’s all about taking care of ourselves, isn’t it?” She gave him a moment to deny it, but he said nothing, so she continued, “I’ll do what I need to do, Roland. Good bye.” She pressed the off button.

  A list of things she could have said began to form in her mind, and then lengthen. But in the minutes and hours that followed, the list began to shrink and condense into the single wisest and most compassionate phrase, the perfect thing to have said.

  Chapter thirty-eight – lost days

  A steady drumroll of ticks and patters supplanted the dreams, which had been occupying Roland’s mind for seemingly hours. He cracked open an eye and glanced at the clock on the nightstand—7:26. Sitting up, he separated the blinds covering the window at the side of his bed and peered out into the backyard of his brother’s house. It was unusually dark for the time of day. A gust of wind drove a sheet of water against the windowpane, blurring the view. A storage shed, and the dense row of arborvitae that bordered the yard, appeared black against the dark-gray distance. A similar morning from another time and place flit in and out of his mind, teasingly, like an uncertain promise, leaving him searching in vain for specifics. Lying back down, he rolled over to his side and pulled a pillow to his chest.

  The early hours were always the hardest. Roland would often wake before dawn, then lie there in the dark, unable to return to sleep, attempting to unravel the sense of dread that held his peace of mind hostage.

  Though he had not yet called, in the months since he’d left Phoenix, he had managed to locate a phone number for Joyce. Her name, as he discovered, was not Bax, nor was it Rubens, but Schoenfield. She lived near Dallas with her husband and two boys, twelve and nine. Regardless of the seemingly inflexible arrangement, he considered calling. He pictured her holding the receiver to her ear, but struggled to recall her voice, which bothered him deeply. He’d call, but what would be the point? To jog his pained memory and justify his self-pity? He doubted his ability to contain his feelings and desires, which seemed to have a will of their own. Could he really hide the truth from her?

  The muted sound of a flushing toilet—water rushing through the plumbing somewhere below—Brian, getting ready for work, or Molly getting up for school.

  What day is it? He searched his mind—the latter half of October was the best he could do. He drew a lungful of the cool air sliding down from the windowpane above, and then exhaled a half-moan, half-sigh, his thoughts wandering to a conversation he’d recently had with his brother, in which he asked about Dana and her husband’s relationship to her.

  “If you weren’t happy,” Brian had said, “you sure had everyone fooled.”

  He was shown photos taken during family get-togethers: holidays and birthdays, pictures of him with Dana, them posing in some, their arms around each other, big smiles. Initially, the images were disturbing—pictures of himself, and no memories to accompany them. But there was an incident, which he did recall: Nancy trying to entice him to phone Dana, to invite her to dinner. It now seemed a lifetime ago.

  Dana… She had a younger brother. What was his name? He recalled meeting Dana at a party. The details, however, had long since been dulled by the fog of time.

  He’d studied the photos of himself and Dana together, searching for signs of affection. Though he tried, he found it curiously difficult to keep himself out of the pictures, to dissociate from this other reality—his alternate self. He wondered if his mind was compensating for the lack of memories by creating false ones. Certainly there was love, he reasoned, there must have been for the relationship to have lasted as long as it did.

  A noise like a rattling came from somewhere deeper within the house. The chocolaty scent of coffee seeped into the room. The light filtering in through the bedroom window was only a degree brighter than it was when he’d first awakened. Still raining. He pulled on some clothes and headed for the kitchen.

  “Good morning.” Brian stood by the sink, pouring steaming coffee into a mug. “Spot o’ joe?” Brian said, affecting a British accent while raising the beaker of coffee.

  “Think it’ll cut through this deposit of crud?” Roland stuck his tongue out.

  “Oh, God.” Brian returned the beaker to the warming plate, then grabbed a worn scrub pad from the sink. “You’ll need this, I think. Get the heavy matter loosened up first.”

  Roland shook his head—“Don’t you think there could be a germ or two on it?”—then raised an eyebrow. “Is that a Cheerio stuck on there?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I’ll take my chances with the joe.” He lifted a mug from the drain board. The patter of rain drew a glance toward the window above the kitchen sink. Water streamed down the outer pane in thin, vertical bars. “So dark out.”

  “Yeah, so much for yard work. Looks like it’ll have to wait till next year.”

  “What is today?”

  “Twenty-third.”

  “Saturday?”

  “Yeah.”

  Roland was about to suggest taking the day off, but stopped himself. He’d been feeling increasingly self-conscious about his employment status. He was considering taking a job, any job, but at the same time couldn’t get past the inexplicable wall of reluctance that stood in his way. He’d not yet taken the first step toward adjusting to his circumstances; committing, accepting conclusively that there was no returning to the life he remembered. The feeling that he was somehow in the wrong place, that he didn’t belong in this world, was always right there, just below the surface.

  He squinted toward the window. “You were planning on mowing today, huh?”

  Brian peered out over his soggy backyard, then after taking a sip of coffee, smiled and nodded. “Most inopportune weather.”

  “I didn’t have a lawn… in Arizona. I liked it like that though. It was pretty… the land there.” Rivulets of rain streamed down window.

  “Would you go back? I mean, live there again?”

  He turned to Brian. “I have to go somewhere. I know that. When I picture myself back there though, it doesn’t feel right. Too lonely, maybe.” He gazed down into his cup at the wiggling reflections on the surface of the coffee. “I suppose I’d get over it in time.”

  “Have you given anymore thought to visiting Dana?”

  He pictured himself phoning her. Though empathy typically came naturally for him, his attempts to explain himself consistently ended in frustration, leaving him puzzled over his tenacious compulsion to care.

  “It’s none of my business. I just thought…”

  “I have been thinking about it… about trying again. I feel bad for her. I do. I just don’t know what to say though. Do you think I should lie, make up some story that she might find more… acceptable?”

  Brian scratched behind his ear. “I think what she really wants is for you to rectify what you’ve done… whatever it is she perceives you’ve done. She has sixteen years invested in you, you know? She just wants reconciliation.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “Roland, whatever your life was before, it’s not that now. You met Dana, married her, and then spent the last sixteen years with her. That is reality. T
his reality. It looks to me like a good life. And it may just be there waiting for you… there for the taking.”

  Roland furrowed his brow. “You’re suggesting I step in and be her husband?”

  “I think if I was in your shoes I’d give it some serious thought.”

  “Just step in… and fake it?”

  “How about stepping in and being yourself, not fake anything, like just give it a try, you know.” Brian rubbed the whiskers on his cheek.

  “Even if I wanted to, I don’t know that I could. She doesn’t believe me, for one thing. If I were to change my story now, how would that look? Psycho or scumbag?”

  “So much for yard-work.” Beth entered the kitchen wearing an oversized T-shirt that reached her knees.

  “Why? Is there a problem?” Brian turned and looked out the window. “I was just about to go out and start the mower.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Knock yourself out.”

  Roland spent the best part of the day near the fireplace with a book in his lap. He’d read a paragraph, realize he had no idea what he’d just read, and then start over. The word “reconciliation” kept popping into his mind. He read a little more, then stopped and stared into the fire. Reconcile what? He again pictured himself calling Dana, and tried to imagine the conversation—her responses, her listening and finally understanding, but then recalled the last attempt he’d made and how poorly it had gone.

  Later that afternoon, Molly wanted to go out for a movie. Beth and Brian were easily persuaded. Roland, though, chose to stay behind.