My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

  We see Henry Berger entering his hotel room. He tips the bellhop more than he expects, says: “My wife will be joining me later.” When the bellhop leaves, Henry Berger walks to the window to check the view. He puts his suitcases on the bed, opens one of them, takes out a change of shirt and then, as if an afterthought, a small revolver which he rests next to the shirt. He walks around the large room, looking for something—a bugging device, it soon becomes apparent—and seems disappointed not to find one. He then picks up the phone and makes a call. Woman’s voice: Si?

  Henry Berger: Let me speak to Carlos Soto, please.

  Woman: Not here.

  Berger: Is there some place I could reach him? I’m an old friend.

  Woman: He has no old friends. There is no place to reach him.

  Berger: I wouldn’t be calling unless it were important.

  Woman: Leave your name and place and he will locate you.

  Henry Berger gets into a taxi, gives the driver an address, and settles back into his seat. After a moment, he has an intuition and glances out the back window to see a black limousine keeping pace. They turn a corner and the limousine, some fifteen yards behind, also turns. Henry Berger insructs the cab driver to do what he can to shake the car behind them. The driver, after initial confusion, says: “You mean the way do in Amercian movies? 1 do my best for you.” The cab makes an abrupt left turn at the next corner, then speeds two blocks and turns left again. In a few seconds the limousine reappears in pursuit. The driver says that he has not shown them his best yet. After narrowly avoiding a collision with a truck—this after a succession of hairpin turns—the cab loses its pursuer. Berger looks at his watch, shakes his head despairingly at the loss of time.

  Cut to Berger going though the front doors of an apartment building that might have seemed elegant in the îyio’s. There is an odd quiet in the building, the lobby (which has a fountain at the center) desolate. Berger takes the lift up, rings the buzzer at 50, waits, rings again, tries the door. The door is open and he goes in, calling “Carlos?…Carlos?” There is no answer, no sound of life. The stub end of a cigarette, however, is still burning in an ash tray. The bedroom door is closed and Berger knocks on it twice before going in. He stops after taking two steps into the room, turns his head. We see at a blurred distance, as if Berger were glancing at them out of the corner of his eye, the corpses of a man and a woman on the bed. Berger is profoundly upset, sits down in the living room at the edge of the sofa. A matchbook on a coffee table catches his eye—Cafe Fleurs de Mal, he reads upside down..

  A knock at the front door—perhaps it was the fifth or sixth knock—recalled his attention.

  He let himself out of the study—the door sticking briefly—and hurried down the long flight of stairs, wondering why his visitor had overlooked the bell. It was the kind of knock that policemen in movies made in the middle of the night.

  He thought he knew who it was even before he opened the door to let his son in.

  Tom stood there, frowning apologeticaly, his swollen canvas suitcase a foot or so behind as if it had trailed him there without his notice. He had the look of someone who didn’t plan to stay.

  Terman waited a moment before inviting him in, frozen himself in the doorway, considered embracing his son, cosidered taking his hand, considered acknowledging some pleasure in his presence, but found himself committed to silence and inaction. He remembered an appointment he had and asked Tom if he knew the time.

  “Am I too late?” Tom asked.

  Terman went behind his son to gather up the lone suitcase—was that all there was?—and asked in passing where he had been, mumbled the question.

  “Let me take that,” Tom said, pulling it from his father, the case suspended momentarily between them, the object of a tug of war. Terman gave it up and Tom carried the suitcase in himself.

  “I don’t know how I missed you,” Terman said. “If it was my fault, I apologize.”

  Tom dropped heavily into a chair, the springs crunching under his sudden weight. “It’s not too comfortable,” he said. “It’s not the lap of luxury so to speak.”

  Terman took the rebuke personally, indicated that the larger of the two couches was the most reasonable place to sit, a piece of information Tom acknowledged with a nod, though he didn’t trouble himself to move. Perhaps he liked being uncomfortable, Terman thought, perhaps that’s what he wanted. “Did you spend the night in a hotel?” he asked him.

  “No,” Tom said.

  “Where were you all night?”

  Tom studied the question from all sides. “Around,” he said.

  Where did the time go? Terman noticed that it was already after two (seven minutes after) and he phoned Max to say he had been detained unavoidably. “Tell you the truth, I’ve forgotten why I wanted to see you,” Max said. “No doubt it will all come back to me in a blinding light when you get here. How’s young Oedipus making out?” When Terman got off the phone, Tom had his eyes closed.

  He was going to shake him but discovered he was reluctant to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Tom” he whispered. “Tom.”

  “Sleepy,” the boy murmured, the voice dredged from some pocket of childhood.

  “Tom,” he whispered, “your room is on the third floor, second door to the left from the main stairway. I have to go out a while on business. There’s some cheese in the refrigerator, stilton and brie, which should tide you over if you get hungry. Will you be all right?”

  There was no response from the sleeping form, barely the sound of breathing. The boy had a mustache or the beginnings of one, yet seemed younger than his age, seemed with his eyes pressed shut like a fearful and vulnerable child. Terman took a blanket from the hall closet, a faded pink blanket that might have come with the house or been donated by Isabelle for some occasion he disremembered, and put it over Tom’s lap.

  “Tom,” he said, standing over the sleeping figure, unwilling or unable to leave, “I’m going now.”

  It was twenty-five to three and he took a taxi, despite feelings of impoverishment, so as not to be any later than was already unavoidable. The days went too quickly, he thought, moved in accelerated time, didn’t know when to stop. He was forty only last year and in less than a month he would be forty-five. Where had his life gone?

  Max’s secretary, Valerie Lowe, reputed also to be his mistress, had her hand on his shoulder, was shaking him with unreasonable zeal. He had been getting layed in a cathouse in some obscure town in Idaho while waiting for his car to be gassed. When rude hands were laid on him. “You were snoring obscenely,” Valerie said.

  Two men of a certain age were coming out of Max Kirstner’s office, expensive suits, one of whom, an investor in films, Terman had met before.

  The other, a hawk-faced man, prematurely white-haired, came over and shook hands. “Luke Terman, is it? I’m a great fan of yours.”

  Terman aspired to conceal his dislike for his ostensible admirer, took the other’s hand. “What a coincidence,” he said. “I happen also to be a fan of yours.”

  “Mutual admiration society, are we? I doubt you even know my name.”

  “I may not know your name,” he said, “but I have your number.”

  When the men were gone Max apologized in his perfunctory way for having kept Terman waiting in the anteroom. “I’m not my own man,” he said. This remark, which he used at every opportunity, self-parodying and ingratiating as it seemed, was an excuse, Terman knew, that permitted Max almost anything.

  “Whose man are you this week?” Terman asked.

  Max looked over his shoulder in parody of a man pursued. “Let’s repair to the inner sanctum,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

  Terman trailed his employer and collaborator into the elegantly cluttered inner office, sat down before invited to.

  Max took out a bottle of brandy and two coffee mugs from his desk—it was the way they always started—and poured them both a drink. “Do you have anything for me?”

  “I thought
it was you who had something for me.”

  Max laughed with his mouth closed, took a thick nine by twelve envelope from his desk and placed it in Terman’s hands. “Take a look.”

  “Must I?”

  “You bloody well must,” he said, making an ironic face at the ceiling. “You’ll love it, old son. It’s from the fine Italian hand of the producer’s nephew.”

  He knew his line. “I’ve seen the fingerprints before,” he said.

  “They want us to go into production in ten days,” Max said casually, watching him out of the side of his eye. “We can’t do that, can we?”

  “I thought all the money wasn’t in place.”

  Max put his feet up on the desk. “For the sake of argument, let us say the money is there, a proposition we both know to be contrary to fact. If it were all there, could we or could we not begin principal shooting in ten days? Is the screenplay, in your opinion, ready to be shot?”

  “Whenever you’re ready to shoot it, it’s ready to be shot,” Terman said, his irritation undisguised. “You’re the director.” He had the sense that they had had this same conversation, almost to a word, six months ago.

  “Terman, Terman,” Max said, spoke his name as if he were a recalcitrant child that needed shaking, shook him by his name, loosed his name in the air between them, pointed a finger at him. “If it weren’t your script, Terman, what would you advise? I put myself in your hands.”

  Terman looked at his hands. “They’re empty,” he said.

  Max pantomimed exasperation, poured them both another brandy. “What are we talking about? Is it your perception of reality, old son, that I don’t want this film to happen? Can you honestly accuse me of faint-heartedness on this project? Have I not been Henry Berger’s most enthusiastic supporter but one from the outset? I issue no blame but the script, which I think is basically terrific, has never been quite on target, has it?”

  Terman stood up to say that he disliked being manipulated, was prepared to walk out, though he sat down again with only the barest murmur of complaint. He had the sense that Max understood him, that what wasn’t said was in its own way made known.

  The subject changed, or evolved into something else without appearing to change. “I want this film to transcend its apparent occasion,” Max was saying. “This isn’t a genre film we’re making, is it? We’re dealing here, as you know, with a transcendent conspiracy, a cosmic malevolence. Okay? If all the agencies of civilization are corrupt and murderous, we have to offer the viewer some kind of moral counterweight. That’s the missing element. Do you see my point?”

  Terman had a sense of déjâ vu comparable to walking into a movie you had dreamed or seen before under another title, though Max often generated that illusion in him. The director made a self-deprecating gesture then laughed at himself.

  “Marjorie’s been longing to have you and Isabelle over for a feast,” Max said. That unfulfilled expectation had been in the air between them for months.

  “We’ve been waiting to be asked over,” Terman said. “We talk of nothing else.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that,” Max said. “Some people are coming to the house in Kent for the long weekend and I want you and Isabelle to join the party. It would give you and me the opportunity to make finishing touches on the script mano a mano.”

  “Not this weekend, Max,” Terman said. “My son just arrived and I really have to spend some time with him.”

  “No problem there,” said Max. “Thing to do is bring the prodigal along.” The director got up, a whimsical finger in the air—some further comment held in abeyance—and went into the bathroom adjoining the office.

  Had he been dismissed? Terman got up to go, though not before overhearing the splashes of Max’s disemburdening in some secret place behind the wall.

  “You’ll have to give me directions,” he said to the closed door.

  “You just follow your nose,” said Max.

  Driving back to the Holland Park house, he wondered what Tom was up to in his absence and conceived a scenario.

  Even after Tom heard the door close, even after he imagined his father getting into his car and driving off, even then he kept his eyes closed for another ten or fifteen minutes, focusing on a swatch of light that seemed to burn through the blackness. He conceived himself getting out of his chair, his eyes still tightly shut, like a spirit stepping out of its body. His spirit didn’t go far without him, it never had.

  The house was even bigger than he had imagined and more bizarre, one inexplicable place moving anomalously into another. He knew from his father’s letters that certain movies had been filmed there, but the odd thing was how different the mood of each of the rooms, how startlingly unrelated to one another. He decided to see it all, to take the full tour, starting on the third floor and working his way down. The room set aside for him was at the far end of the hall—it was the third room he had visited, the only one with a freshly made bed—and looked, he thought, like someone’s idea of a 19th century French whorehouse. The bed was too soft. There were pink cupids on the oval ceiling. The plush carpet was a garish red and with the overhead light on gave the impression of something recently eviscerated. On one of the two desks was a Blue Guide to London, a Nicholson’s London Street Guide, and a map of the underground system. On the other was a set of two keys. He wondered why his father had chosen this particular room for him. Two of the rooms on the floor were more spacious, another had a more interesting view, still another was more appropriately furnished. Of the five unused bedrooms on the third floor, his was, taking a variety of factors into consideration, the third best overall. Who was the best room for, the room with mirrors on the walls and ceiling, an enormous space with a large round bed in the center and a terrace coming off one of the windows? He studied his reflection, reflection within reflection, in the several mirrors (odd, he thought, how unlike myself I am) then moved down to the second floor.

  There were five rooms, not including bathrooms, on the second floor: his father’s study, two bedrooms, an empty space, and a storage room with a padlock on the door. In this order, moving from left to right: study, storage room, bedroom, empty room, master bedroom. The first thing that struck him about the study was both waste-baskets were over-filled, a handful of scrunched up papers on the floor. He left the room, then tempted by something else, came back and sat down at his father’s desk, swivelling absent-mindedly in the imitation leather chair. There was a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter. He typed “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” Facing away from the desk, he reached behind him to open a drawer, the middle of three, his hand sidling in while his glance rested elsewhere. He came away with a black fountain pen the thickness of a fat cigar which he scrupulously returned. When he exhausted the middle drawer—there were no discoveries there, nothing but the obvious—he moved on to the drawer below. He worked his way through layers of manuscript to the bottom where he found the very thing he imagined himself looking for. And even then, moving it about with his fingers, grasping it, removing it from its secret place, he disbelieved his intuituion. He had only to turn his head slightly to verify the weapon he held in his hand, to verify that it was something other than a toy, but for the moment he resisted the discovery he would allow himself in the following moment. Having demonstrated a certain self-control, he rewarded himself by looking at the object in his hand. It was new, he thought, pethaps unused. It smelled faintly of oil and had an almost imperceptibly oily aspect. Tom watched himself in the mirror on the far wall, aiming his father’s gun at the opposing figure. The sounds of bullets crashing against glass were only in his head, though from time to time he made small firing sounds in his throat, a muffled simulation of the real thing. It was childish, he knew, and he observed himself ironically pointing a pistol at the ironic observer that confronted him. The question of what the gun was for never asked itself and he was returning it to its place, trying to put it away exactly as it was found, when he was startled by the ringing of a doorbell. He p
ut the gun and a box of shells in his jacket pocket and started down the stairs.

  The doorbell rang a second and third time. Tom retraced his steps to the top of the stairs and waited anxiously for the intruder to decide that no one was home. The door opened—he could hear the turn of a key—and a woman came in. He couldn’t quite see her face from his vantage at the top of the winding stairs but he had no doubts it was a woman. “Hallo,” she called. “Is anyone there?”

  “My father’s not here,” he said, coming down.

  A long-legged woman of about thirty or so appeared at the bottom of the wide stairwell. “Tom, is it?” she asked.

  It was not something he was ready to deny. She introduced herself as Isabelle. “I’m Isabelle,” she whispered. He thought of her—the words came to mind unbidden—as his father’s whore, the latest and greatest. She looked like a movie star, he thought, somewhat like Julie Christie. “Do you live here with my father?” he asked.

  She walked away, turned her back on him, before answering. “I have my own flat if it’s any of your affair,” she said.

  “You came in with a key,” he said.

  He followed her into the kitchen and stood behind her at the stove while she waited for some water to boil, said he hadn’t meant to be offensive.

  “Of course you meant to be offensive,” she said.

  “The hell with you,” he said and sulked off.

  She made herself a cup of tea which she drank in gulps while standing alongside the stove with her back to him.

  “How do you know what my intention was?” he asked, his voice rising. Isn’t it possible that you’re the one who’s being offensive?”

  Isabelle was looking for something in a cabinet above the sink, her full concentration on whatever she sought.

  After she left the kitchen, excusing herself to go by him, she went upstairs to the master bedroom. She was taking a hair dryer and some other gadgets from one of the dressers when Tom glanced in. “Does my father know you’re doing that?” he asked.