B

by Jonathan Baumbach

  She looks at him bemusedly with her mouth partly open as if she were sucking on his offer like a lozenge, looking for the right words to phrase her kind refusal. Then he notices that the music has stopped and the band is packing up its instruments.

  –Well, she says. I promised I’d be home by ten o’clock.

  –Is this your husband, your sort of husband, you promised?

  –Uh huh, she says.

  –Perhaps we can share a cab, he says. Which way are you going?

  After they collect their coats and walk to the door, Anna says, –I don’t think it’s such a good idea sharing a cab. Do you mind very much?

  –I do, he says. I was looking forward to spending more time with you. But if...

  –Then let’s do it, she says.

  Just as a cab arrives—it takes awhile—B’s former wife comes out of the building and calls something to him that sounds like, –This is just like you. Perhaps it is something else, something friendlier.

  As soon as the cab takes off, Anna says, –I’ve been thinking about my own wedding—do you know how it is?—your daughter reminded me of myself. All weddings seem somehow the same wedding. Mine wasn’t a big wedding—just some close friends—but it was in a hall bigger than we were at today. As Roland put it, we didn’t want it to look as if we were doing something sneaky.

  His own memories somehow mingle with hers, though he hangs on her words as she recites her story. He has the impression he is listening to a monologue in a private play.

  –Roland is my second husband and I married him a few months after the divorce to Jack was finalized. The thing is, Jack and Roland were partners in a business venture and we got involved while I was still living with Jack. Messy, right? Anyway, I left Jack for Roland because I thought I wouldn’t be doing what I was doing unless it was love. You don’t want to hear the details. I should mention that Roland was going through his own messy divorce when we got into our thing. We were out on the dance floor at our wedding celebration when it struck me that I was making a mistake in marrying Roland. It was not just that I loved Jack more though I thought that too, but that I needed Jack, needed to be married to Jack, in order to be interested in Roland. This was all going on in my head when Roland, who was a little tipsy, tells me not to expect too much from him. He was being evasive but I knew what he meant. He meant there would be other women on the side, that that was the way he operated. –Remember, it cuts both ways, I said and he said, –Oh God, do I need this, as if I wasn’t even there. Something clicked off in me after that and though we got along—Roland’s mostly a nice man—the marriage ended for me the day of the wedding.

  –But you’re still with him, B says. How long has it been?

  –Four years, she says, resting her head on his shoulder, but it’s never been a real marriage. I’ve never felt married to him the way I felt married to Jack.

  His place is on the way to Anna’s so the cab stops for B first. What happens next goes something like this. He presses some money into her hand to cover the cost of the ride, which, after a failed attempt at returning, she hands over to the driver. She refuses her change and follows him out of the cab. Not a word is exchanged until she says, taking his hand, –I’d like to see your place.

  He has every intention of inviting her up and letting things take their course. Still, the charm of his memory of her as the precocious little girl he had danced with at a wedding 30 some years back has dissipated during her story in the cab. He continues to find her attractive, but it is his history—perhaps his karma—to avoid complications. He has had enough difficult people in his life.

  –You made someone a promise, he reminds her.

  –Did I say that? she asks. If I did, I said it to avoid whatever we seem to be getting into now. Roland doesn’t care what I do. And what do you care what Roland thinks anyway. You don’t even know him.

  A cab lets someone out at the building next door and B puts his arm around Anna and urges her gently toward it, opening the door for her with an uncharacteristic grace of gesture that surprises them both.

  She takes a moment, apparently puzzled at the turn of events, before climbing into the cab. –Will we ever have our second dance? she asks.

  –There’s always another time, he says automatically.

  –No there isn’t, you jerk, she says and pulls the door shut.

  He stands at the curb watching the cab disappear around a corner, feeling an unexpected ache of loss—the second this night— aware of being alone in the dark dancing with regret.

  XIV. HIS VIEW OF HER VIEW OF HIM

  This concerns the day—the hour—the minute—the year—that B finds himself a character in someone else’s book, the book sent to him in bound galleys by the author, a woman he was once—what?—intimate with in not easily characterized ways, but hasn’t seen in several years. The portrait is not malicious, or not obviously malicious, and is, he supposes, unrecognizable to anyone but himself. Nevertheless it disturbs him as if he had looked into the mirror one day and came upon someone else’s deceptively familiar untrustworthy face staring back. His character in the book behaves erratically toward the author’s fictional persona, moving close only to pull away, which corresponds roughly to what happened between B and the author in real life. The portrait depresses B because, though accurate in its limited context, it seems at once unrepresentative and deserved.

  The false (accurate) portrait of him in this book makes B want to tell his own story, or at least defend himself against the implied charges against him in the text. What B wants to do is reclaim himself from this caricature version of him that lives briefly on this other author’s page.

  The woman had been affectionate and kind—he would allow her her own version of her behavior—and he had been wary and unpredictable. The portrait of him in this woman’s book is at once a message to him (see how cowardly you were, the text whispers) and a form of revenge. The truth is, B wanted some kind of sustenance from this woman, wanted to be loved (wanted also not to be loved too much), but didn’t want to recapitulate former disastrous patterns. He was coming out of a long term painful marriage with G, whom he had lived with for 16 years (whom he had once much loved) and he was not emotionally ready for what he sensed the woman, who would one day make him into a fictional character, wanted from him.

  If he was afraid, which is the way it suited the woman to perceive him, what was at the heart of it? B thinks about it, trying to recall his feelings at the time. In some atavistic pocket of feeling, he tended to equate sex with obligation, a tendency that had led to nothing but grief over the years. Obligation, as he knows it, is the antithesis, the major obstruction, to being his own person. He wants to move in the world without chains of responsibility to anyone but himself.

  Above all, he doesn’t want to give the woman, or any woman, or anyone for that matter, the wrong impression.

  Though his justifications are sincere enough, B suspects that they contain elements of self-deception. His secret motive, a second sense tells him, was revenge. Wounded people behave cruelly despite every good intention to be as kind as desperation allows. After reading of himself in the woman’s book, B confides to his journal his own corrective version of what happened between them. Unsatisfied with his own truth (or the piece of it he punishes himself with), B feels compelled to come up with another perspective on the story, one in which the behavior of both characters is more interestingly mysterious. It is not an attempt to justify himself, but to let the events, which are sometimes irrational and confusing, reverberate for themselves.

  So when I finally came to accept the fact that my long term now disintegrating marriage to Genevieve was not susceptible to repair, I embarked on a succession of trips as a way of trying out the possibilities of a new life. I visited friends in other cities and countries, accepted residences at writer’s colonies, whatever availed to put some distance between me and the woman, my companion for sixteen years, who had become my relentless enemy.

  I met
Anita at an artist’s colony in upstate New York, and for the first week of my stay barely distinguished her from the eight other women in residence. It was not that Anita didn’t stand out, it was that my attention was elsewhere. Whenever she looked in my direction she seemed to have a smirk on her face as if we shared an outrageous secret that precluded the others. One night after a dinner when we sat next to each other and made awkward obligatory conversation, I asked her if she’d like to go for a walk. She said she intended to go back to her studio to work, though she accompanied me nevertheless.

  What did we talk about? We talked about the other residents, assessed them as if they were difficult texts, while at the same time dropping hints about our own histories. Anita, I learned, had been a concert-level cellist before taking up writing. Her father had died when she was nine. She had a complicated difficult relationship with her mother.

  Even then, even after several after-dinner walks, in which pieces of our lives were strewn on the path like debris, I had no clear take on the woman, almost never thought about her when she was out of sight. I tended to obsess about my wife, whose sudden angry disaffection had been greatly puzzling, which meant trying not to obsess about her, which meant trying to shut everything out but the structure of the first paragraph of the novel I had started and restarted and deconstructed several times in the past month.

  The embryonic novel, whose first paragraph I was perfecting, concerned a psychotherapist whose much loved wife (also in the shrinking profession) rejects him, and continues to reject him, for no reason he allows himself to understand. My idea was to tell part of the story—half even—from the wife’s vantage, inventing a perspective I found mostly incomprehensible as a way of making sense of it.

  In the first chapter of the novel, I would tell the story of the marriage from the male protagonist’s viewpoint, covering the dynamic of the relationship from their first meeting until the beginnings of the end. The wife’s chapter, which would serve as a kind of counter-valence, would deal with things as they were happening and would start later on in the chronology of the novel’s events. I sensed that the book had already taken shape inside my head and I had only to open the doors to let it out. My priority at the colony was to get as much of the novel on paper as a four week stay, used unstintingly, might allow.

  If I felt written out at the end of the day, I might take a walk with Anita around the grounds or go to the pavilion and play ping-pong with the regulars, but whatever I was doing, my real occupation was in tending the secret emerging novel.

  One day, Anita asked me if I could make the time to read her manuscript. She asked in a way that presumed on nothing and allowed for refusal so I said, of course, sure. The manuscript was of an autobiographical episodic novella composed of extremely short self-composed unembellished narratives. I didn’t know whether I liked the book—its spareness attracted me—but I saw no reason not to be encouraging. The reading of her text was the beginning of a kind of unsought intimacy. What do I mean by intimacy here? I mean there was something unspoken, something half-conscious and implicitly sexual going on between us. While at the same time there was nothing going on.

  When my four week stay was up, I went home to my wife and children, armed with the illusion that my dying marriage might still be revived. I was quickly disabused. I hadn’t been home more than a few hours when Genevieve let me know, as she had before, that my presence oppressed her, that there was no hope for us continuing together.

  His wife’s version of her relationship with B is another story, which means there are three possible narratives here governing the same or related events: the woman’s novel, B’s counter text, the wife’s conjectured story. A fourth text might be introduced here. The story of R, a younger woman B had been seeing off and on during the last years of his marriage. The woman who wrote the book—we’ll call her A—has no notion of R, nor has his wife (called G here) who has rejected B while continuing to hold on to him. R, who was in love with B, distrusted him, believed that he would never break with his wife. Even when B separated from G, R continued to think the worst of him. This is background, the rudimentary information necessary to fill in the gaps.

  The day before B left for his residence at an artist’s colony in New York State, he told R that he didn’t want a relationship that excluded seeing others, which precipitated a fight that ended in an agreement—the third or fourth such—to call it quits. Even so, they continued to exchange letters while B was away. Throughout their relationship, R’s absence was more compelling to him than her presence. He missed arguing with her over trivialities with life-and-death subtexts, missed their lazy love-making afternoons together. At the colony, A became a substitute for R in the way that R had been a substitute for his disaffected wife.

  Can that be right? Was B really behaving as badly as this account makes it seem? That he was in love with the sulky girl, who was 18 years his junior, was his presumptive license to be uncompromising with her. A future with R, as B saw it, would lead inevitably to a slightly varied version of what he had been going through with G. Nothing was worth living that nightmare again, not even illusions of love and renewal. Clearly the long range price was too high.

  So B was getting over both wife and mistress when the woman who would one day put him in her book as if his existence were a product of her imagination came into his life. The week before he had asked A for the first time to take an after dinner walk, R had visited, and stayed with B in one of the discreetly decaying Victorian hotels in town. The visit, like most of their times together, had started exuberantly and ended badly, R bitter and accusing, B wanting her gone.

  A week or so after B had returned to the city, A called him to say that she was going into the hospital to have an operation to remove a growth from her throat. She joked about it to hide her fear. B joked back, said his wife had just hit him over the head with a goosenecked lamp, which also happened to be true. That’s terrible, A said laughing, why don’t you move out. I’m working on it, he said.

  A was back in her Chelsea apartment two days after the operation and called B to let him know of her return. B went over to see her immediately.

  Once a week—it was a bit like going to church—B went to divorce mediation with his wife, conducted by a British psychologist in offices near NYU. It reminded him of group therapy, which he looked back on with similar displeasure. Almost all they talked about in divorce mediation was money and property, who got what, and how much he would have to pay his unemployed wife on a monthly basis for the next thirteen years. When the two-hour sessions were over, B visited A at her apartment which was in walking distance from the mediator’s office. For B, it was like coming to a safe place after an extended swim in shark-infested waters. He was his usual obsessive self during these visits, replaying the mediation sessions for the woman, as though they were a form of improvisatory theater.

  After lunch, they would sometimes sit on the woman’s couch and neck, a flirtation that never went beyond the enthusiastic preliminaries. At the colony, one time after walking A to her studio, necking with her outside her door, he was invited in under the proviso that he stay the night after they made love. B reluctantly declined her offer, saying he needed to get a good night’s sleep to be able to work in the morning, which was most likely a form of avoidance.

  What was at stake in these midday visits? B found the mediation sessions on the near side of unbearable and retreated to A’s place for sympathy. He had no idea of his motives beyond blind urge; a fog of need surrounded him. B went to see A because it was pleasant to be with her, and when it stopped being pleasant, when her friendship no longer comforted him, his visits came to an abrupt halt. He had only the most fleeting sense of what A wanted; the dim light he shed on the world at large barely extended beyond his own driven nature. He was putting himself back together—that was the work at hand—by denying to himself he was broken, and it was the kind of work, because so hopeless, that was all encompassing.

  For all the plea
sure he took in A’s company, when he was away from her she had no presence in his life. Occasionally, his estranged wife would call, using the pretext of discussing the children to ask for money for one thing or another, using the pretext of asking for money as a means of retaining contact. Everything she did, directly or through the children, overtly unpleasant or insidious, put B in a frantic state.

  At some point, to keep his sanity he stopped answering the phone. Sometimes the phone rang as much as twenty-five times, as shrill and persistent as a car alarm. G had to know he was there, avoiding her. Some days he unplugged the phone; other days he left the house to wander the neighborhood visiting friends, stopping at the local greasy spoon for coffee.

  For all his evasion and denial, her claim on him seemed inescapable.

  Anita was always available when I called, though rarely called herself. In the early months of my separation, what I think of as the first phase, we got together at least once a week, usually during the day, more often than not for lunch, a recapitulation of our after-mediation trysts.

  She sometimes asked why I didn’t see her in the evenings or perhaps that was Rebecca and I’m confusing the two.

  Rebecca was on a brown rice and tofu diet, Anita was smoking nicotine-free cigarettes and drinking alcohol-free beer. Both women were into selective forms of exclusion, which seemed to me a worrisome principle. They were practicing to do without. Was I next on their denial agenda?

  While they were paring down their lives, I was into unselective inclusion, wanting something and accepting anything. I meant no harm or meant perhaps—in some unseen way—only harm.

  So I visited Anita no more than once a week for lunch or dinner, usually at one of the local ethnicities—the Thai restaurant, or the Afghan, or the Mexican or the red sauce Italian with the checkered tablecloths covered in see-through plastic, never staying overnight though never foreclosing the possibility.