B

by Jonathan Baumbach

  Though we kept separate rooms—there were no coed dorms in those days—we spent so much time together people referred to us as “the Siamese twins.”

  And then, approximately three years after she had asked the question, my errant behavior answered it. Yes, I was not trustworthy. I had been a time bomb of untrustworthiness set for some vulnerable moment in the distant future. I tended to be a little jealous of the guys who played love scenes with Didi on stage. It wasn’t hard for me to imagine that she might prefer one of them to me, or prefer the character one of them was playing to the character I played in real life. When Didi acted, she tended to inhabit the role she was performing (sometimes offstage as well) for the duration of the play. I thought that she went too far in that regard, that such identification with an imaginary character threatened to blur the boundaries between real self and fantasy. It was one of the things we argued goodnaturedly about. We had a habit of teasing each other over inconsequential faults.

  Sometimes I wanted to do things that excluded Didi but I rarely did because I felt vulnerable when it was the other way around, when she was the one requesting time apart. I took such requests as a token of worse to come. Having this long term desirable girlfriend should have made me more confident and it did to some extent but it also intensified my insecurities. She was so important in my life, so integral, I couldn’t imagine how I would handle her loss, which I sensed was inevitable.

  So it was necessary to wean myself of my need for her, a task that at first seemed unimaginable. Nothing is unimaginable of course once it’s been imagined. I worked at conceiving the advantages of being unencumbered. The obvious one was that, unattached, I could get together guiltlessly with other attractive girls that were off-limits to me in my present situation. Off-limits, unless I was willing to betray Didi’s trust. There was this sexy girl, Elaine, who flirted with me in my Seventeenth Century English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare class, who occupied space in my fantasies. I deceived myself with rationalizations. A writer feeds off experience. My being with Elaine wouldn’t hurt Didi if she didn’t know about it. Whatever was between Didi and me (love, I assumed) would survive a one-time-only transgression. And if it didn’t, then just maybe the bonds between us were less significant than I had allowed myself to believe.

  So I dated Elaine (her last name eludes memory) and made up some improbable tale for Didi about some late paper I needed to stay up all night to finish.

  The date was predictably a flop. I had no talent for deception or had too much talent for it to proceed without being undermined by guilt. Unrehearsed in my new role, I was uncharacteristically stiff and distant with this unfamiliar partner. Elaine did her best to put me at ease and we ended the evening fooling around uncomfortably in the front seat of her car.

  In the morning, Didi called to ask how my paper was coming and I admitted that progress had been negligible. She commiserated and that was it.

  Two weeks later I dropped over to her room unannounced and discovered one of the younger teachers in the English Department sitting next to her on the couch. –You should have called first, she said, seemingly unperturbed at my discovery.

  –I was just getting ready to go, the English teacher said, and in short order I was alone with Didi and anxiously unready to take on an explanation of this awkward discovery.

  I waited, hand on hip, censorious look on my face. I was prepared for anything except her refusal to explain herself.

  –Probably nothing would have happened, she said. It was not an apology. It was certainly not an explanation.

  Her poise provoked me. –What was supposed to happen? I asked.

  –If this is going to be a fight, she said, why don’t we wait until the morning when we both have more energy?

  –I want to know what he was doing in your room, I said.

  Didi made a face, shook her head at me. –I’d like you to leave, she said in a sad voice. Get out of here, will you please?

  Off-balance, defeated, I felt the need to reclaim whatever power I had in whatever hackneyed fashion I could.

  –If I leave like this, I said, it’s over between us.

  –That’s not what I want, she said. You know it’s not.

  My momentum took me out the door.

  In the morning I was full of unaccountable energy and I occupied myself in the hour before my classes by attending to chores I had been putting off indefinitely. I actually straightened up my room, which had been a kind of stage set for romantic disorder, and emptied the overflowing waste basket. I vowed to myself, a pact with my own devil as it turned out, that I would not call her no matter what. However, when she didn’t call at the time we usually talked, it registered as a betrayal. It was something else in the balance to hold against her.

  We had a class together the next day and I decided to stay away rather than go through the awkwardness of meeting and avoiding my other self.

  The following day we crossed paths on Morningside Drive and nodded to each other in ambiguous acknowledgment. After that, I attended the Existential Philosophy class we shared, though changed my seat to the other side of the room.

  Another week passed without so much as an exchange of a word between us. A sense of being unforgivable kept me going in my blindly determined path.

  One day Elaine called and said she heard I had broken up with Didi and that she hoped I was okay.

  –Is that right? I said. Where did you hear that?

  –It’s all around, she said. Didi has told her friends that it’s over. Is that not your view of it?

  I conceded that if Didi thought it was over, it would be idle for me to think otherwise.

  Elaine wondered if I was in the mood for company and I conceded that I was, more or less, pleased at her taking the burden of decision out of my hands. This time I cooperated in my seduction. I didn’t think of Didi while we fucked, made a point of not thinking of her, which made her a kind of invisible third party in our collaborative betrayal. Seeing Elaine made it easier for me not to suffer Didi’s loss, so I stayed with the relationship even after my pleasure in it had faded to nothing.

  It was Didi finally who called to invite me to a play she was performing in and to say, in passing, that she was sorry things had ended so abruptly between us. The call made me aware of missing her, but I was still angry too, up to my ears in unacknowledged pain and empty pride. I continued to feel obscurely betrayed. I went to watch Didi play Julie in Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” with Elaine at my side. We went backstage afterward, Elaine attached to my arm, to make the appropriate noises over Didi’s performance.

  When Elaine’s head was turned, Didi mouthed the words, –Call me.

  Her request pleased me and I did call the next morning but she was out when I called or she didn’t pick up. Things might have been different had she been there. Her unavailability fueled my anger, and I made a decision not to call again. If Didi wanted to talk to me, wanted to see me again, continued to love me, the next move was hers.

  So pride or stubbornness, perhaps on her part too, kept us apart during our senior year. We were at the same parties on occasion each with different dates and had nodded to one another across a crowded room. We avoided conversation as if some unspoken danger lurked in the touch of our voices.

  One night, after such a party, the phone rang when I was already in bed. At first I thought not to answer, assuming a wrong number, but when it kept on ringing I leapt out of bed and grabbed the receiver. After I said hello, after some barely audible breathing on the other end, my caller hung up. I knew who was calling (I thought) and sat up in bed for another hour wondering what to do about it, deciding after a while that there was nothing to be done.

  I didn’t talk to her again until after the graduation ceremony, at which time I shouldered my way through the disorderly crowd hoping to find her alone. When I caught up with her I didn’t know what to say so improvised a few banalities about how important her friendship had been to me. Didi made a sassy remark in return then tu
rned around to leave, then turned back to face me again. –Just who the hell do you think you are? she said in the voice of outrage. Her hand was shaking and I was aware of her pressing it to her side to disguise the fact. (I remember it as if it happened only hours ago.) Her anger confused me, made me want to defend myself (from what I didn’t know), made me want to apologize, made me uncomfortable in the way of our first meeting.

  –I just wanted not to leave college without saying good-bye to you.

  –That’s all you wanted, she said, smiling not quite at me. You just wanted to say good-bye. You had nothing else in mind but saying good-bye.

  I felt that she was mocking me and that I deserved to be mocked. –Is there something wrong with that? I asked.

  –For some reason I have trouble accepting the ingenuous pose of that question, she said. Why, I wonder, is that?

  Finally, I held my hand out to her and she studied it for a moment before turning herself around and hurrying away.

  The next part is a story occasioned from Didi’s obit, which travels close to the line of what happened, allowing for the evasions of embarrassment and the tics of the imagination.

  2.

  B writes a condolence letter—the same letter—to the two surviving daughters, apologizing for intruding on their grief with his own, identifying himself as an old friend of their mother who has been out of touch for the longest time. He isn’t sure why he is writing or why he presumes to have something to tell them about a person they surely knew more intimately than he ever did. Of course he knew her before their time so to speak and so his recollections might provide a different perspective. He is writing because he feels compelled to write and there is no one else to whom he might address such a correspondence. Though he knows nothing of their lives beyond what is reported in the brief obituary in the Times, he feels (presumptuously, he concedes) that they are fortunate to have had such a mother, a woman so vivid that all these years later he could still conjure her in memory, a woman who (so it always seemed to him) had an extraordinary capacity for being in the world. A generous- spirited, openhearted, uncompromising woman of exceptional poise and presence. He elaborates as tactfully as a predilection to hyperbole allows, and he concludes the letter by saying that if there is anything he can do for Didi’s daughters in this time of loss, please draw on him as they would an old friend of the family. Under his signature, he adds his address and unlisted phone number.

  He composes the letter as if in a dream, the words coming from some secret source, and he mails both copies before giving the issue a rational second thought. Two days after the jubilant posting, it strikes him how foolish and inappropriate his gesture must seem to the daughters, to anyone in fact living outside his head.

  Three weeks later on the same day (oddly), he gets responses from both of Didi’s girls. The first letter he opens, which is from the younger daughter, Deidre, is one of those ritual by the numbers notes (spuriously personalized), thanking him for his kind considerations. The other from Deborah Kovaleski-Green is a different proposition altogether.

  –I never liked my mother especially, it starts, never really got on with her. I must be out of my mind telling you this, but there’s something in your inappropriate letter that makes me think you’d understand. It goes on to list her grievances against her mother: career taking priority over family, self-involvement, cruelty to her father (whom she separated from when Deborah was fifteen), indifference bordering on negligence to the daughters (herself in particular), radical mood swings, erratic displays of affection. Whenever they got together in recent years, they tended to fight over the most inconsequential things. Even after her mother’s illness, the fights continued, though in muted form. They had never had opportunity to make peace with one another—there had been no forgiveness on either side. She was said to be like her mother, which she had only recently accepted as possibly true. She would like to meet with him if that was doable to get his distanced positive view of her mother in greater detail. She would be grateful to him if he could make the time. As a postscript she adds that she had read several of his books and found them very sympathetic. She leaves two phone numbers—home and work—and signs off, Your friend, Debby Kovaleski-Green.

  B rereads the letter several times, rereads it as if it were one of those difficult post-modern texts that needed decoding, though was essentially untranslatable. Of course he is gratified that she wants to see him, though he is uncomfortable carrying his gesture any further than it has gone. That is, he is so eager to see the daughter, he suspects they’d both be better off if it didn’t happen.

  B has begun to keep a notebook of recollections concerning Didi, which he rereads and comments on as if it were someone else’s story. It has become an issue of faith with him that had he not broken with Didi, had they married, perhaps had children together, his life would have taken a different, happier, course. No other woman, none of his wives, had meant as much to him as Didi had. In losing her, as he sees it, he has lost the essential thing. As a result of her dying, he has had taken from him the last remote possibility of regaining what he had lost.

  B goes through a week long argument with himself before responding to Debby’s letter. He makes no mention of her offer to meet with him in person, but talks again about his memories of Didi, elaborating on things he has already written. He thanks her for the “openness and generosity” of her letter and adds—this at the very end—that the voice of the letter seems very much like her mother’s voice as he remembers it, which means that without her being conscious of it a reconciliation had taken place between mother and daughter in that Debby had “lovingly assumed certain qualities of her mother into herself.”

  After he sends the letter, B feels disburdened for a few days as if his letter has somehow set things right in the universe.

  Her answer comes by return mail. That is, his letter comes back to him with a handwritten appendage at the bottom.

  –Does this mean you don’t want to meet with me or what? is the full extent of her message.

  He rereads his own letter, feeling rebuffed by its return, trying to decipher what she means by her answer. At the same time, he recognizes that appending a note to his letter and returning it is something Didi might have done in a similar situation. Didi had a gift for deflating the self-important gesture.

  B sends back his returned letter, with an appended answer attached to her appended query. –I don’t know that I have anything to tell you about your mother that you don’t know, but I’m available to meet with you if you still think it will be useful.

  A week or so later, B gets a phone call from a woman who sounds like Didi (or as he remembers her) and a few days after that they meet for dinner at a neighborhood bistro on the upper west side.

  He is looking for someone who resembles Didi so when a small dumpy woman walks up to him and introduces herself as –Your former girlfriend’s daughter, B has a sense of dislocation. This can’t be Didi’s child. Though he makes a belated effort at concealment, he is unable to hide his initial shock at the daughter’s appearance.

  –Not what you expected, right? she says. Sorry to disappoint. When I said I was like my mother I didn’t mean I looked like her.

  B goes through the motions of being gracious, not his strong suit, holds the door for her as they enter the restaurant (though they bump into each other exchanging places). As soon as they are seated, a young woman (much prettier than his companion) comes over to take their orders. B orders a glass of Merlot while Debby opts for a vodka cranberry. –I don’t hold my liquor well, she tells him, giggling after the first sip.

  –Then maybe you should stop drinking, he says.

  –What are you up to these days? she asks B.

  –I’m working on a long story that threatens to become a novel, he hears himself say. I used to teach at Queens College, but I took early retirement.

  –Uh huh, she says as if his comments bore out her preconception of him. I’m a therapist. I’ve spent so muc
h time in therapy, it seemed the inevitable next step to become a shrink myself. What did you teach?

  –I taught writing, he says.

  –What else! she says. I gather from your letter that your relationships with women after my mother have not been happy ones.

  B starts to object, but she waves him off. –Why else would you be nostalgic about a woman you’ve had no contact with for almost forty years.

  –I loved your mother, he says, surprised at the anger in his voice. Your mother and I loved each other.

  –And what about the others? On one of your book jackets, it says you’d been married three times.

  –You can’t believe everything you read on the back of book jackets, he says.

  –You deny that you’ve been married three times?

  –Those are just biographical facts, he says. I happen to think your mother and I might have made a life together.

  –Spare me, she says. My guess is, that the two of you wouldn’t have lasted more than two or three years if that long.

  –What’s that judgment based on? he asks.

  –My sense of the two of you, she says.

  She is about to elaborate on this perception when the waitress comes by to describe the specials of the day. B orders the shitake mushroom appetizer and the monkfish on a bed of spinach. Debby says she is not very hungry and orders the calimari salad, which is an appetizer, as her main course. She also has a second vodka cranberry and eventually a third. Before the coffee and dessert arrive, Debby begins to nod, her eyes flickering shut, her head moving closer and closer to the table. A vague snoring sound, a kind of stereophonic counterpoint, seems to come from some other corner of the room.

  B asks her if she’s all right and gets a distant sigh in return.