B

by Jonathan Baumbach

  Sometimes two months passed between calls, sometimes six, sometimes over a year. They never discussed him in these talks—she had done listening to him years ago, was tired of hearing him complain about his former wife’s unfairness—but dealt solely with her issues. At times, the calls were merely requests for favors—recommendations for jobs or fellowships, blurbs for forthcoming books—which, no matter how busy he was with other commitments, he always granted without hesitation.

  The calls continued without discernible pattern. Although no arrangements were made for getting together, he would run into her from time to time usually at a place that he was more likely to be than she. If these meetings were not the coincidence they appeared, it was not something he thought about with concern.

  One day, unable to sleep, he found himself staring out the living room window, surprised to discover a car double-parked in front of his house, a shadowy figure sitting in the driver’s seat, hunched forward over the wheel.

  I began increasingly to value my privacy during this transitional period in my life. What do I mean by that? The truth is, I was hiding out, avoiding emotional creditors.

  The phone rang two or three times an hour, but I had an answering machine (with a message I changed every few hours) to represent me in my self-imposed exile. Sometimes I erased the day’s messages without even screening them—more often I listened to them with a glass of wine in my hand before erasing them.

  I answered some of my calls, though not always right away, not always the next day or the day after, in no hurry to hear the voice of accusation in its righteous heat. Rebecca and Genevieve, in fluctuating order, were the ones who called most often, averaging between them about 10 calls a week. In third place was the caller (or several callers)—I made no suppositions—who left only silent messages. These usually came after midnight. I imagined some of the silent calls came from Anita, though I had no evidence for that as-sumption. For about a two month’s period, except on inescapable occasions, I lived my life without the company of women. What was the point? you might ask. Was I happier without women? No, I wasn’t. What I was was less burdened by unanswerable demands.

  This was about the time I was invited by the Femmes Club to give a talk on the parameters of marriage at the Fort Hamilton Armory.

  B was alone in the house and the double-parked car, a black, late-model, mid-sized American, with a shadowy driver folded over the wheel like some coiled snake, made him uneasy. He found an aluminum baseball bat in the closet of his younger son’s room and, after a few practice swings, he took it to bed with him, slept alongside it in case the figure in the car, or some unseen other, intended him harm. Though it seemed unimaginable, he couldn’t help reflect on the extremely remote possibility that a contract had been taken out on his life.

  When the phone rang—it was not yet morning—instead of answering, he went to the front window to see if the black car was still on vigil in front of the house. That the car was gone made him easier about returning to sleep. He expected no message from his caller and received none.

  A crashing sound coming from inside the house woke him. He listened to the sound echo in memory and placed it on the third floor almost directly overhead. Before leaving his bed, he waited in vain for further indications of an intruder.

  Carrying the bat in readiness as if he might be called on to pinch hit, B investigated the third floor. A painting had fallen from the wall of one of his son’s bedrooms. It was an explanation, if an unsatisfying one, for the frightening crash that had exploded him from sleep.

  Later in the day, after adding two sentences to the possible final chapter of his novel, B called V at work to confide his irrational fears.

  –No one wants to kill you, she assured him. I take that back. It is unlikely in the extreme that anyone is both angry enough and crazy enough to pay good money to have you killed.

  B was convinced and at the same time unable to let go of his obsession, which stuck in him like a burr. –G wants to kill me, he said.

  V laughed. –Yes, but she doesn’t need a gun to do the job.

  That evening, waiting for V in front of a Japanese restaurant in the theater district, B noticed A idling by in a preoccupied state on the other side of the street. She appeared to be unaware of him and he was about to call to her when he decided instead to avoid her by standing behind a tree. At this point V arrived and they kissed in front of the restaurant, an extended greeting, B glancing over V’s shoulder and meeting A’s eyes.

  That was the first time he was aware that there was a previously unchartered pain in his left hip

  I had no reason to believe that Anita was following me beyond two perhaps three circumstantial meetings. When an episode in your life ends inconclusively, you tend, in writing about it, to let the story devise its own next step. Anita’s next step was to put me in her book in an anonymous way as one of the vexing shadows in her life. As I was her shadow, she had become mine.

  What did she hope to gain by sending me a copy of her book with the unflattering portrait of me in it? Was I supposed to respond? Was it the opening of a new dialogue between us?

  Recently, I looked for her book on my shelf to see again what it was she had written about me, and I couldn’t find it. The book had mysteriously walked away, or more to the point, I had put it somewhere unattainable.

  There are reductive questions to be asked and B feels obliged to ask them whenever feelings of mortality arrive unannounced. What’s it all about, he asks himself, this frantic waking dream between birth and death? Answers will reveal themselves eventually, he believes—he has absolute wavering faith that they will. That’s why his appearance in A’s book at first had certain positive aspects for him. Well, B thought, maybe A knew something about him, had some special insight that would show him to himself in a new light.

  Though somewhat wary of the prospect, he was prepared to see himself in a new light, to discover some unacknowledged secret self, through her eyes. As it turned out, A only knew him from the limited vantage of how his presence in her life had impact on her self-concern. He was a man who had failed her. The character that apparendy represented him was an unnamed older man toward whom she was inexplicably drawn, someone, who for reasons of fearfulness, had only fitfully returned her affection. That was the sum of his sketchy identity in the dream pages of her book.

  As portrait of B did not yield much in the way of his understanding of self. He was a fantasy figure for A, whose interest was less in his character than in how his disappointing behavior was congruent with the disappointing behavior of other men in her fictionalized life.

  Some months have passed since he’s read A’s book and his memory of the passages that apparently refer to him have receded into vagueness.

  I have all of Anita’s books on my shelf except the one in which I appear, which remains, despite my obsessive search for it everywhere, persistently unavailable. The book’s inexplicable absence enhances its mystery. I go around to a few local book stores only to discover that the disappeared book, which is called Fathers, has been sold out or, as in one case, never put on order. Other matters in my life supplant the obsession with Anita’s text and I forget my quest while going on, as is my pattern, to some new feckless pursuit.

  Then one day, wandering about in Books & Co., looking for a gift for my father, I discover Fathers staring at me from its alphabetized perch in the Psychology section of the store. Wasn’t it written as fiction? Has it been misshelved or is it possible that I’ve misperceived its nature all along?

  B picks up the copy of the woman’s book—the last available, the only one—from its home on the bookstore shelf and riffles through the pages, trying without success to find the references to him that had been so upsetting on first encounter. He leans against a wall and reads the first thirty-two pages of the book. He is a missing person, a manifest absence, an effaced self. If, as fading memory insists, he is a character in the book, he must nevertheless occupy a very small portion of its pages. H
e scans the last twelve pages. When he looks up from the text, he notices that several people are watching him. Self-consciousness distracts him and after reading the closing section, he puts the book back on the shelf. Is it possible (reason suggests not) that the copy sent to him by the author has an altered text meant only for his eyes?

  I walk away from Fathers, leave the book behind as I have, I suppose, left Anita herself behind, and return to my bookshelves at home. The author’s presence, though dimly felt, survives for me in her other books. Like her texts, Anita, as I call her here, is sardonic, whimsical, deadpan, angry at the betrayal of fathers and father surrogates, a chronicler of disappointed survival. I am just another disappointing shadow-father in the life she imagines for herself as fiction. Doesn’t it also follow that I have been a shadow, though a somewhat different one in each case, in the lives of Rebecca, Jane and Genevieve as well?

  I am the father, the surrogate father, the false shadow of the father, who has already betrayed them irrevocably. My part in their story has been written in advance. I am crowned only to be deposed, trusted only to betray that trust, adored only to be despised and rejected.

  Putting it all in perspective, B recognizes that at best he is just another negligible player in the writer A’s fictional memoir. Perhaps he is not even that, perhaps he is only there by dint of imaginative leap. It is a presumption, after all, to imagine oneself someone else’s character. There are several male characters in A’s text, one of whom (none of whom) may be a stand-in for B. B, who conceives himself a presence in another’s book, is at this moment sitting in front of his computer inventing the text that appears above under the author’s real name. A is just a construct in the text, an occasion for its invention. She is only real (as is her book containing B) within these pages, which is also true of the others, the wife G, the young mistress R, the confidante J, V the new woman in his life, and also of course B himself, the hero of the text, the author’s invented self.

  —

  Turn the page and we all fall away into the ether like matter converting itself into traces of smoke, like the elegy of forgotten dreams.