B

by Jonathan Baumbach

  –Speak for yourself, buddy, she said. We had a choice—at least I did....You don’t really think you’re addicted to Ms. Thing, do you?

  –In a way, B said.

  Laura came over to where he was sitting and rested her forehead against his. –No you don’t, she said.

  B ended up spending the night at Laura’s, though neither would say what actually happened between them. Whatever, it was not a relationship that had legs, as they say.

  In any event, two days later B got a cryptic phone call from S. –You’re the last one I expected to pull a stunt like that, he said in an uninflected voice. Is that your idea of friendship?

  B would have said, –What? which would not have raised the level of discourse if S hadn’t hung up the phone on his protracted momentary silence.

  After that, B stopped answering his phone. His answering machine spoke on repeated occasions to Penny, her messages becoming increasingly passionate. –Don’t you know I love you? she whispered on the most recent one. He felt like a reformed alcoholic in the early stages of withdrawal or like Ulysses resisting the sirens. At some point, he not only didn’t answer his phone but erased his messages without listening to them. That regimen lasted two days.

  It was not so much that he forgot about her as that whenever she came to mind, and he felt the aching pull of her absence, he thought of her betrayal of him with S which short circuited his longing. He had a number of self-preserving tricks.

  He threw her letters away—there were three in six months—without opening them. He was being cowardly, he told himself, but hey, so what. Days later, in fits of courage, he would scour the garbage in the vain hope of recovering one of the banished letters.

  Matters of the heart, no one had to tell B, were never clear cut. But one morning he woke up with the almost certain assurance that his fever for Penelope had all but gone. It was also that day, early in the afternoon, that B received a phone call from a familiar almost forgotten presence.

  –I’m in New York, she said in her small singsong voice, dispensing with the preliminary chat, and I’d like to see you if it’s possible.

  It was odd how these things work. He was surely over her, but the sound of her voice sent a chill between his legs, his penis rising to salute the exorcised past. Her call, the terrifying surprise of it, caught him with his guard down. Free of her thrall or not, what harm could come of a brief meeting at a public place. The public place they agreed to meet was the Cosmos, a ratty diner across the street from the marginal low-rent hotel she had taken for the night.

  She was there waiting for him in a booth in the back, dressed all in black, her complexion mottled, her long hair compacted in an oddly shaped bun, her face even gaunter than he remembered it. He could barely sense her perfume over the burnt smell of the coffee.

  Penny held out her hand with awkward almost mocking formality and they shook hands. As soon as B, his hand his own again, seated himself across from her, she took his measure with a glance, nodding her head in private corroboration.

  –How have you been? he asked, striking a casual tone

  –How have I been? she asked herself. I’ve been excellent.

  –Me too, he said. Excellence was having its day.

  She looked like hell and was more beautiful than ever. It was a compelling combination. –What are you doing in New York? he wanted to know, wanting her to acknowledge that she couldn’t keep away.

  She pointed to an envelope on the table, which was the first he noticed it. –I’ve written a novel, she said, blushing or so it seemed (perhaps it was the light) at the admission.

  His only reaction to the news was that he regretted his excessive encouragement. The two stories she had showed him in Seattle were undistinguished examples of middle of the pack undergraduate creative writing class product.

  –And you’ve found an agent, right?, who thinks she can find a publisher for it.

  –Yes. I’m kind of pleased with it, though I’d like a less selfinterested opinion. She giggled.

  He agreed to read the novel and give her an honest assessment of it. She thanked him for his generosity. No avowals of love were made, no offers of wild abandoned sex. There had been no need on his part for self-protective gambits. The force field of irony he kept between them had caused him to miss what was going on. He had hardly allowed himself a real look at her. On parting, she gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  2.

  The novel, which is called Regrets Only, is written in the form of a long letter from a young woman to an older man. Spare me, he thought, after he read the first two sentences. But it was reasonably compelling and after moving distractedly through the first 30 pages, he began to get caught up in the story.

  The man the heroine ostensibly writes the novel to is her mother’s second husband, a man she lives under the same roof with from the age of 12 to three days before her sixteenth birthday. It is difficult to tell at the outset whether her passionate letter is meant to be accusatory—a kind of this is how you ruined my life letter—or as it increasingly seems a bizarre confession of displaced love.

  She starts out by apologizing (ironically?) to him for making his life “a living hell” during the time he was married to her mother. When her mother brought him to the house for the first time and introduced them his presence made such a powerful impression on her, she realized she had to keep him at a distance or she was lost. She then recounts a series of mostly petty nastinesses she pulled at his expense, and how his gentle treatment of her awfulness provoked her to raise the stakes. He never reports her to her mother, which forges a kind of bond between them. It’s the bond she feels that makes her crazy, that compels her to want to destroy him. She tends to see him (his name we learn is Max) in terms of polarities. Max is either super kind or super coldhearted. One or the other. They seem almost never to talk directly to one another. It’s as if he understands what it is that drives her to mistreat him. She then decides that either he is super cool or he is as infatuated with her as she is with him. If the second alternative is the true assumption, it changes everything. She begins to take notes on him in her diary as a way of figuring him out.

  Max, we learn, is an actor, not always employed, who goes out auditioning for parts during the day while waiting tables several nights at week. One day the girl—she’s 13 now—comes home from school and hears Max rehearsing a part (or talking to himself) in the living room, the door conspicuously ajar.

  She can tell it’s some kind of love scene from the few words she picks up so she stomps in as if looking for something and asks him if he’d like her to read the other part. He seems amused at her offer and no wonder, but then he says, why not, and gives her a set of cues he’s typed out on two sheets of paper. It’s not as much fun as reading a whole part, but she likes it well enough to continue doing it for a few more days. She’s waiting for something to happen, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to unless she does something to make it happen. It takes awhile (the unencouraged narrator doing whatever she can to provoke), but finally she gets Max to take her in his arms (to make the scene more realistic to him) and after that the fireworks begin.

  For more than two years, the narrator and her stepfather have a stormy clandestine affair, which is presented with explicit sexual detail and covers slightly more than half the length of the novel. The narrator seems less compelled by the sex (for Max the sex seems primary) than by the wary passionate obsession between them. The girl continues to be surly to Max in public, particularly in front of her mother, as a way of keeping up appearances.

  Finally, during a religious crisis, Max breaks the affair off, offering, as he puts it, “a different kind of love.” The narrator, furious at being discarded, fuels herself with fantasies of vengeance, including killing Max and then herself. Weeks pass and she sulks about the house, looking for a way to make Max sorry. At some point, the decision makes itself. Her mother confronts her one night when they are alone and asks her to explain her unhappiness.


  –It’s nothing, the girl whines. Just a phase.

  –Does it have something to do with Max? the mother asks. And then prodded by her mother, she makes a seemingly reluctant accusation. Max has forced her into having sex with him. Her reluctance to inform seems to give her story, which she embellishes with each retelling, added weight. The dye is cast. Her mother seems more than willing to take her word, which is in itself gratifying. She had always felt that Max took priority over her in her mother’s life. The next thing she knows Max has moved out without even saying goodbye to her. One day she asks her mother what Max has said in his defense and the mother, who seems traumatized by Max’s defection, acknowledges bitterly that he made no defense.

  The girl cuts her classes and begins drinking on the sly, symptoms of the larger problem. At the same time, she feels impervious to pain, secretly triumphant and powerful. At the advice of the school guidance counselor, her mother puts her into therapy. The hope is that she will work through her problems by getting in touch with her real feelings. Instead, she retells her calculated lies to the therapist, embellishing at every turn, until she begins to take at face value her own invented story. Also, by reciting the story of her abuse by an older man, she enlists sympathy from her listener, invites needed attention. There is pained tenderness in the eyes of her therapist when she recounts the abuse she suffered at her stepfather’s hands.

  And then, in an understated scene, she seduces her therapist. The remainder of the novel deals with a succession of affairs she has with much older men, the bouts of drinking, the overwhelming sense of undefined loss, the abortive suicide attempt. When she sees Max in a television commercial—this during a stay at substance abuse hospital—she breaks down and cries, the first tears she has shed in years. She recognizes that she has never stopped loving Max. Out of this realization, she writes the letter that comprises the novel.

  The novel altered to a great extent B’s sense of Penny, as in that instant when a processed photo negative suddenly presents itself with undeniable clarity. He called her almost immediately—he had read the entire manuscript in two extended readings—just moments after he scribbled the last of his notes to himself concerning it. –I’ve read your book, he said.

  –Well, she said, did you just love it? Should I burn it and throw myself on the fire?

  –It knocked me off my pins, he said.

  –Whatever that means, she said. Do you want to talk to me about it? I can come by later tonight if that’s all right.

  By this time—the book had moved him to another place in regard to her—B had forgotten his vows to keep his distance. He suggested, his manner teacherly, she come by (it was now 8:25) around eleven.

  Penny arrived in her black outfit at two minutes before midnight and B, who had been dozing, arose from the grave of his dream to unlatch the door. After she refused his ritual offer of a glass of wine, he took out his notes and read them to her, elaborating as necessary. Penny listened distractedly, changing her seat from time to time, sucking on a finger.

  –You’re so sexy when you’re being smart, she said.

  3.

  She stayed the night in his bed, coiled around him like a snake. He lived in her cunt as if it were the Garden of Eden, memorizing it so he would never forget the smell or the magic of the terrain.

  In the morning over breakfast, he asked her if she wanted to hear any more about her book.

  –It doesn’t matter, she said. Hell, I’m not going to publish it. I wrote it for you. It’s the story of my tacky life.

  B nodded, speechless. Hadn’t he understood that that was the case all along? –It’s a terrific book, he said. In the evening, he took her in a cab to the airport and waited with her for her plane to arrive. She gave him a chaste peck on the cheek before she slithered through the metal detector. After that, he took an escalator up to the observatory and watched her plane ascend. Her smell hung about him like an invisible embrace. As he left the airport and took a cab home, her musky aura rehearsed itself in memory, echoed its pleasure. As he rode in unyielding traffic through the Midtown Tunnel, horns blaring in discordant chorus, he had a sense of extraordinary well being. He was, for a rare moment, poet-in-residence in his own skin. It wouldn’t matter to B now, not a lot, not everything, if he never saw or spoke to Penny again. Which meant they could remain friends or whatever it was they were. The feverish component of the relationship, the unappeasable sexual heat, had passed. It was that, the near unbearable joy of their night together in his New York bed, that brought a satisfying closure to the story. He could write about it now, and would, he could take it or leave it. Closure released one from debilitating obsession. Anyway, that was the myth B brought home with him to his lonely apartment.

  VII. HEARTBREAK ANONYMOUS

  1.

  B was in the throes of mourning or something worse, some incalculable sorrow, some persistently free-floating grief. He managed no more than three hours of sleep a night, woke in the dark with this ache of loss like a computer virus scrawling its indecipherable demons across the page of his soul. B went to bed when exhaustion wore through his resistance to sleep with the same unabated grief hanging out within. It had no source or at least none he could identify and say this person, this woman, this lost love, is the cause of my pain.

  It was seven years now since I had separated from Genevieve with whom I had lived (while sometime married) for 18 years. It seemed like longer than that, it seemed like the illusion of forever. There had been a few women in my life, a handful or so, since the breakup of my marriage, and though I had been in love with some of them, none had lasted long enough to leave behind this weight of loss in her wake. Perhaps it was all of them together I grieved for or perhaps it was Rebecca, the last in line, the one who reminded me most of Genevieve.

  If Rebecca’s absence from my life was the cause of my suffering, there was remedy at hand. I could just call her up and arrange to see her, which I thought of doing only long enough to conjure the last maddening days of our relationship. The more I obsessed about my situation, the less susceptible it was to being understood. When these feelings of loss persisted like one of those perpetual nagging colds New Yorkers seem to get, I had a medical examination (which revealed only that my resistance was down) and visited a succession of user-recommended shrinks. My medical doctor advised an exercise regimen, running or swimming or cycling, and gave me a prescription for an antidepressant. In the spirit of trying anything, I took the drug for a few weeks, and felt somewhat better, the ache still there but velvety and distant.

  The shrinks—there was really only one—made a point of not offering advice, wanted me to work through whatever it was, which meant telling her about my relationship to my mother—my non-relationship—that can of worms.

  I got on fine with my mother, I said. It was what I always said about her. She was a bit remote, though unrelentingly supportive. No telling details offered themselves. As a last resort, though otherwise unclubbable, I attended meetings of a group called Heartbreak Anonymous, which I had seen advertised in the Personals section of The Village Voice. Meetings were held Wednesday nights at a downtown church immediately after the Alanon session was concluded. I sensed an obvious difference between my situation and that of most of my fellow heartbreak sufferers. Everyone at the meeting seemed to know exactly who the heartbreaker was that had reduced them to their present tormented state. The purpose of the group was to help the heartbroken root out obsession with the lost beloved. Members chalked up the days in which they didn’t obsess about winning back the one for whom they grieved. On this score, I was out of the loop. My treacherous ghost, whoever, had neither name nor face.

  H.A. (the insiders name for it) did not fail B altogether. At the end of the third meeting, he struck up a conversation with a lively faded beauty with the face of a Fra Angelico Madonna and offered her a ride home in his car. The woman, H, invited him in for a drink or whatever and they ended up doing the whatever, behavior directly contrary to strictures
for H.A. members of less than 60 days standing.

  –This has been so good for me, she said just after the minor aria of her orgasm had had its moment on stage. You’ll notice, I didn’t once mention Phillip’s name.

  –You didn’t, he acknowledged, until now.

  –Usually when I’m with a guy, I end up talking about Phillip, which gets a lot of guys pissed at me. It’s different with you. You don’t even remind me of Phillip except in the eyes. Phillip’s eyes are the same shade of blue.

  When B was ready to leave, retiring the half-finished cup of coffee she had insisted on making for him, she lowered her eyes shyly and asked if they would ever see each other again.

  The question flustered him. –I’ll call you, he heard himself saying as if the answer had been waiting on his tongue almost forever.

  H smiled sadly, gave him a skeptical look. He assured her again that he would be in touch. Wary of commitment, he was glad to get away.

  For all that, he felt almost okay (despite the ticket on his windshield) after he retrieved his car and made the long drive home. The grief in residence, that persistent uninvited guest, seemed to have gone off on an unannounced trip.

  The liaison with H had done B some good and he wanted to call her the next day to tell her so, but he couldn’t find her number anywhere. He could barely remember her giving it to him, though it was possible he had forgotten to take the piece of note paper she had written it on.

  I went to the next H.A. meeting at the All Soul’s Church, expecting (though not quite hoping) to run into Helena. Her absence from the meeting disappointed me more than I imagined possible. My inquiries produced raised eyebrows. No one seemed to know anything about her. Helena’s last meeting, for all anyone knew, might have been her first.

  I continued to feel improved, found myself whistling in the shower one morning, felt almost functional. Two weeks of H.A. meetings passed without Helena in attendance and it bothered me that she would think I had reneged on my promise to call.