B

by Jonathan Baumbach

  When he introduces himself (she doesn’t remember having met him), the woman, Y, assumes B is a representative of the college there to meet her, a delusion she holds on to even after he explains that he too has been stood up. When he tells her of their mutual predicament, she reproaches him in a graceful way on his failures as a host.

  –You must learn to plan ahead, she says. Not everything we do works out as we intend it. He acknowledges the wisdom of her remarks, suggests they walk toward the college with the hope of promoting a ride along the way. She will stay at the station, she says, and wait for them to come to her. It is her method in all things to let others come to her.

  What can B do but wait with her. –I can’t leave you, he says, a remark which earns him a hit-and-run kiss on the cheek.

  –Never? she asks.

  He wonders at that moment if there weren’t something fateful about them meeting this way at the deserted college station. –It does stand to reason, doesn’t it? B says, that the college, having planned on our being there, will send someone to claim us. The remark earns him a second kiss, this one passed from her fingers to his cheek. They sit for a while on one of the dark platform’s two backless stone benches, leaning in to each other to keep the cold wind from taking residence between them.

  –I do remember you now, she says.

  They talk about walking up and down to get warm or going inside the building to escape the wind. Ways of warming themselves is not their only subject. He is surprised when he puts his arm around her and she cuddles into his shoulder, as much surprised at his own gesture as at hers. His lost and barely remembered feelings for this woman revisit uninvited. Sensation returns to the tips of his fingers.

  When they stand up to go inside, she lets herself be kissed. She covers his mouth with her hand when he tries or seems about to try to explain himself. It is not as if he had anything to say that had not been heard. It is uncomfortable inside the small waiting room, airless and overbright, radiators wheezing like slumbering drunks. In the light, he discovers that she is not the person he thought she was, not the one he fell in love with at sight. This unlooked for discovery leaves him emotionally bereft as if his most passionate feelings had remained on the platform without him.

  He doesn’t tell her that she is the wrong one. They sit like strangers now, slightly apart, each reading a book of the other’s poems. The taste of her tongue, the weight of her head on his shoulder, are barely a memory. And this is the way they are, lost and found, when the awkwardly shy Assistant Professor who had been sent to pick them up makes his apologetic appearance.

  –Can you believe it? I couldn’t find the station, he tells them.

  The Assistant Professor drives them toward the college in his cluttered brown and green station wagon, the seats and floor decorated with debris, old newspapers and magazines, loose Pampers, broken plastic toys, almost every surface occupied. They run out of gas before they arrive and their surrogate host, who is prepared for such emergencies, hurries off with a one gallon can under his arm, telling them not to worry that he’s done this before.

  Moments after he leaves, a white late-model oversized American car drives up alongside their beached whale. A whitehaired man in formal clothes, a trustee perhaps, sticks his head out the window and asks them if they would like a ride to the college. B, who has no trust in the Assistant Professor, accepts immediately (though his door won’t open), but the woman in back (the one he’s fallen in and out of love with in the past hour) says the appropriate thing to do would be to wait for their driver to return. B argues his case, but the woman won’t be dissuaded from what she knows to be the right course.

  –I can’t leave her, he explains to the trustee, who drives off without them.

  –When you say that, she tells him when they’re alone again, it makes me want to cry.

  The Assistant Professor returns, feeds the empty tank, starts the car, and they drive to the college without further mishap. Except they arrive on campus ten minutes after the reading is scheduled and they find themselves locked out of the appointed building, Affect Hall. What’s with this college? Even if they get the building open (and the Assistant Professor has, with that intent in mind, gone off to find a key) where will an audience come from? There is no one else, no small clique of English majors, waiting to get in. At that point, B realizes that he has left his overnight bag at the train station. The only thing he can do, which is of little practical value, is imagine himself calling the station and asking the uncommunicative ticketseller to put his bag in a safe place for him until he can manage his return.

  A security guard unlocks the building from inside. Momentarily, they are milling around in a small auditorium, the other poet, Y, holding his hand in a secretive way. An audience of five assembles itself. The poet asks his companion whether she’d like to go first or second. She has been drinking from a flask and is slightly befuddled.

  –What are my other choices? she asks.

  The chairman of the English Department, who wears black glasses, arrives to introduce the readers, or so B understands the man’s role when he takes the podium. The chairman, who is blind, reads his prepared text with his fingers. His written introduction seems for the first ten minutes or so elaborate and obscure. Neither B nor the faded beauty Y is mentioned by name. What’s it all about? The blind chairman goes on and on as if it were not an introduction at all but a paper elaborating a theory of language.

  –Language is the whim of silence, says the speaker. Panic moves B to get up from his seat in the front row and look around the room. Are the others in the audience as astonished at the blind chairman’s performance as he is?

  –Sit down, Y whispers at him.

  –Don’t you find this strange? he asks her. She puts a finger over her lips, splitting a smile. When he sits down, she puts her lips over his to preserve his unhappy silence.

  When the introduction goes into its second hour most of the small audience leaves. Only B and Y and the chairman’s hearing-impaired wife continue their vigil. The Assistant Professor comes running down the aisle, waving his arms.

  –What’s the problem?

  –There’s been a mix-up, he says. The Broadsnore Lecture is in here. You people are supposed to be in another room altogether. Y insists on staying to the end of the lecture and B is conflicted on whether to leave or not.

  –Come with me, he pleads.

  –It’s not right to walk out on him, she says.

  B follows the Assistant Professor into a somewhat smaller room down the hall. There is an overflow crowd, as it turns out, waiting for him. They stamp their feet in welcome on his appearance at the podium.

  –You can’t believe what I went through to get here, he says. That brings a laugh. It falls to the Assistant Professor to introduce him.

  –I don’t have to tell you how privileged we are to have this man with us today, he starts out, an inappropriate remark that speaks to B’s unacknowledged secret self.

  The fulsome introduction continues. B is pictured as a defender of the defenseless, a man willing to take up causes so unpopular no one else in his right mind would dare touch them. What’s going on? The praise touches him almost to the point of tears. How does this bumptious Assistant Professor know so much about him, he wonders. It is as if he were introducing some figure of national prominence and not a relatively obscure poet known, if at all, for his uncompromising difficulty. And then his name is mentioned (though it is not exactly his name) to standing applause. He has been mistaken for someone else, a trial lawyer (and former basketball great) who has a predilection for representing only the blatantly guilty. At first B plans to deny that he is the famous lawyer they’ve been waiting for, but then he thinks, Well, maybe there’s a more graceful way to avoid the embarrassment of this foolish mistake. Besides he has never had a crowd this large come to hear him. An ambiguous disclaimer might be sufficient.

  –I am not the man you think I am, he says, which invites further applause. Your support
and affection have made this moment possible. There can be no justice without a constituency that acknowledges the possibility of justice. Having run out of platitudes, he waits for inspiration.

  –Why do I do what I do? he asks. The answer sits waiting for him. Because if I don’t, no one else will. The audience offers him a standing ovation. The back door opens and Y, looking tired and lost, slips into the room.

  –To give you a sense of who I am, he says, I want to read you some poems by a poet who I sometimes think speaks for me. The audience clears its collective throat. Y alone applauds.

  B reads his poems for twenty minutes to mumbled confusion. The audience has a glazed look on its collective face when he stops.

  –Are there any questions? he asks. An older woman in the third row has her hand up in a determined way and he nods in her direction. She turns to look behind her before speaking.

  –I don’t normally ask questions in public, she says in a histrionic voice. This is what I want to know. Would you defend someone who would kill his own mother?

  –If I don’t, who will? he says. Next question.

  –If you didn’t, another headline seeker would, a voice shouts out.

  B points to a young girl in the back.

  –In your opinion, what is the worst crime a person could commit? she asks in a quivering voice. –And would you defend such a person?

  B repeats the question for those of the audience who might not have heard it. –The worst crime, huh? The worst crime is the betrayal of self. The worst crime is the betrayal of love. The worst crime is any crime that has a victim. Such crimes are unforgivable and must be defended.

  –Yeah, the audience chants in one voice.

  A middle-aged man with alcoholic’s eyes asks, –Have you ever committed an unforgivable crime yourself?

  –Yes, says B.

  –Are you willing to say what that crime was?

  –No, I’m not.

  –Animals have rights too, a woman in the fifth row says in an angry voice. –Do you think the killing of an innocent animal should be a capital offense? I want a yes or no answer.

  –Yes or no, says B, playing for the easy laugh. Depends on how innocent the animal is.

  The animal woman gets up and walks out of the room in an earnest huff. Her departure, or perhaps B’s answer, freezes the crowd. B waits patiently for another hand to rise. Y has the next question.

  –Were the poems you read, she asks, written by one of your unforgivable clients?

  –We are all forgivable, I hope, says B.

  The Assistant Professor ends the question period by stepping in front of B and inviting everyone to a reception in a lounge downstairs—wine without chemical additives and lo-fat cheese—where the audience will be given opportunity to meet face to face with their celebrated guest. B, weary of the imposture, looks for a way out, takes Y’s hand and pulls her inside a stairwell away from the crowd.

  –What do you say we pursue justice elsewhere, he says. He expects resistance and is almost disappointed when she says,

  –Where can we go?

  –Let’s just wait here until the crowd disperses, he says, realizing in the next moment that it is not Y whose hand he has taken but someone else, the woman who had been standing next to Y, the one concerned with meting out justice to animal slayers.

  Y finds him with the animal woman before B can excuse himself to leave. She calls him by his presumed name, tells him (eyeing the other woman) that his fans are waiting for him in the lounge.

  What fans are those? B makes a whirlwind tour of the lounge, pressing flesh like a politician, dispensing whatever wisdom the oiled tongue has to offer.

  After the reception there is another party then dinner, then another party. Between the first and third party he has lost Y with whom he has again fallen in love. Anyway it is late and he is slightly drunk and very tired so he goes to the room they’ve assigned him in the Alumni House to take a nap or bed down for the night, however it goes.

  When he opens the door to the room he assumes is his, Room 2 according to the number on his key, he senses that something is amiss. Though the lock on the door answers to his key, there is an intruder in the bed sleeping soundlessly. It is the second thing he notices, the impostor in his bed, the first is the neatly folded pile of clothes on the chair across the room. B leaves silently, takes his outrage and exhaustion with him, sits on the stairs in the hall with his head in his hands. What can he do? He gets a brainstorm, decides to try the doors to the other rooms. There is a couple in Room 1 fucking in a dispirited way and B’s head is in and out before the couple, who turn to stare at him, have time to ask him what he wants. Room 3 resists his key. Room 4, his last hope for sanctuary, is unlocked and unoccupied. B slips into the room like a thief. He locks the door, pulls off his shoes without undoing the laces, and falls into bed—perhaps even falls asleep.

  Next thing he knows someone is knocking on the door. Then he hears a key in the lock and the door click open. A man with a cane walks haltingly toward the bed. The figure takes off its clothes, piles them neatly on the floor and slides under the covers next to him.

  –There’s someone here, B says in a choked voice. The intruder raises his head, looks directly at B—their faces are no more than six inches apart—but seems not to see him. The man is asleep and snoring softly before B can protest again. He imagines himself climbing out of bed and reclaiming his shoes, a gesture he repeats over and over again, waking hours later from this dream to find a heavy arm sprawled possessively across his chest.

  B slips off the bed, searches the floor for his shoes, escapes the room on his hands and knees. Y is in the hall, standing with her back to him, smoking a cigarette.

  –You missed a great party, she says when he touches her shoulder.

  When she turns he notices an ugly purple bruise under her right eye.

  –What happened? he asks her.

  –Nothing, she says, averting her eyes. Nothing worth talking about. She takes a pair of sunglasses from her purse and puts them on.

  –Did they give you a room? he asks.

  –Better than that, she says. I have the keys to a station wagon parked outside that we can take to the station. The thing is, I can’t leave with you....And don’t say what I think you’re going to say.

  –I’ll wait until you’re ready to leave, he says.

  –Look it’s a long story, Y says, but I promised to stay with the Assistant Professor just until he gets on his feet. His wife and children left him nine days ago and he’s in a bad state, suicidal, needy and potentially violent.

  The news troubles B but he says nothing more about it, waits his occasion. In the car, in the passenger seat, just as Y is about to start the engine, he has an urge to put his head in her lap, which is what he does. They kiss twice before moving to the back of the station wagon.

  –You never said anything, she says. It is morning, the back door of the wagon is opened. The sudden light disturbs their sleep, discovers them in disarray, B’s pants bunched at the ankles, Y’s bra perched on a stack of American Scholar magazines like a huddled bird. A small crowd of onlookers makes its presence felt.

  After that, the despondent Assistant Professor, full of mock bravado, traces of tears glazing his glasses, drives them to the station.

  –I can’t leave him like this, Y says to B when they park.

  Leave him, B wants to say, but instead leaves the arena of the car himself. –I’ll wait for you inside the station, he says to Y. She nods to him in uncommitted acknowledgment. He discovers his overnight case sitting in the waiting room and he picks it up and puts it on his lap, reclaims his former life.

  According to the schedule in his jacket pocket the next train for New York City comes and goes in nine minutes. The one after that is three hours and twenty minutes down the road. Five minutes pass and Y is still in the station wagon locked in conversation with the aggrieved Assistant Professor. B worries that Y won’t get back in time to make the train. When he
looks over his shoulder to see if Y is on her way, the brown and green wagon is no longer on vigil outside. B rushes out to look for Y just as he hears the train huffing carelessly toward the station.

  Y’s undeniable absence echoes through the parking lot. He has lost her again. It is always the case with him: every loss seems the same loss, the first loss, the only loss. His first love was a woman he met at a mixer in his freshman year at Columbia. He betrayed her or she him. He no longer remembers.

  B rushes back to board the train, unaware in his haste that the train he boards is actually coming from where he means to go.

  B is dozing at a window seat unaware that he is heading toward Ohio and points west when someone slides lightly into the seat next to him. Her perfume is familiar, so is the feel of her arm on his shoulder.

  –You left without me, she whispers, after all your promises. That’s hard to forgive. She presents him with a ghostly peck on the cheek, the bare touch of her lips.

  The opening phrase of a poem forms itself in his mind. I sensed the sky closing like the door of an abandoned.... He acknowledges her reproach with a nod and closes his eyes to the unfamiliar countryside at the window—a field of motionless brown and white cows with a ramshackle red barn in the distance, a landscape absent from his history until this moment—now edging irreversibly away into the past.

  Will she be there, he wonders, and will it matter, when in the course of things he finds the will or the courage or whatever it takes to look back?

  IV. PLAYING THE GAME