My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

  Marjorie, who was almost his height, got to her feet with his help, balancing herself on her good ankle. For some reason, they found themselves in an embrace.

  She moaned twice for each step they took, asked again and again if she were too heavy for him until the weight of the question were almost as heavy a burden as the woman herself. He was surprised at how leaden she felt, at the deadness of her weight.

  The rain was a fine mist, a veil of grief. Walking with her in the drizzle, holding her up, her arm clamped around his neck, he sensed that someone was watching them through the sights of a gun.

  Just on the other side of the stile, at the place where the pond reentered view, he lost his balance. She dug her nails into his chest as they fell.

  She apologized for her weight.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “The grass was slick and my feet gave out.”

  “You’re not attracted to me,” she said, “are you?” She disentangled herself, her teeth clenched against impending pain. “There’s no pleasure in our contact, is there?”

  In pain himself, Terman had difficulty focusing on Marjorie’s complaint. “You’re an attractive woman, Marjorie,” he said.

  “That ought to hold the old bitch a while,” she said. “Who the hell do you think you are?” She squeezed the neck of her ankle, punished and encouraged it.

  His hip hurt but he was able to stand up without difficulty. He stretched the muscles of his legs, first the right then the left, then the right again. When he stretched the right leg, and only at a certain point, he could feel the stinging pains in his hip.

  “Well,” she said, “what now?”

  He studied the landscape to see if there was anyone in the near distance he might hail; the area was oddly desolate.

  “It’ll have to be on the left side this time,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Have you hurt yourself?” she asked. “I can’t say how sorry I am.”

  He saw no point in denying it—he had long since stopped perceiving himself as a hero—though he was embarrassed at the extent of her apparent concern, the exaggeration of real feeling.

  “Sit down and rest a few minutes,” she said, sliding back a few feet so that the leaves of a large oak screened some of the rain.

  “We ought to get some care for that ankle,” he said.

  “If I don’t mind, why should you? It’s very beautiful here, isn’t it, very still and very beautiful.

  The view, what he could see of it from where they sat, did not strike him as beautiful. It merely satisfied expectation. Nature, it was true, never seemed to him as beautiful or surprising as art. One had the difficulty of course of only being able to see patches of it at one time, fragments of some presumably larger design. He mentioned this heresy to her and got a blank look in return, an almost shocked stare. He resisted apology.

  When they got back to the cottage Max and the others still hadn’t returned. There was a message for an L. Turpin on the desk in the workroom that someone had called, though the name of the caller was not given (the note was barely legible), nor was there a return number. He asked Sylvie, who was in the living room reading a copy of Vogue, if she had taken the phone call for him. Her manner was vague though earnest. She could tell from studying the handwriting that the note to him was not her work. Not only hadn’t she answered the phone, she said, she had no recollection of having heard it ring. Who else was in the house? he asked.

  Marjorie sat in the workroom with her injured leg propped up on a stool, holding an unlit cigar in her long fingers as a prop.

  Terman was trying to figure out Tom’s next move and thought it possible, or not impossible, that his son was somewhere on the grounds of the Kirstner estate.

  “You are distracted, aren’t you?” she said. “Tuppence for them.”

  He said he was thinking of food and Marjorie said she thought there was some fruit in a cut glass bowl in the dining room, granny smiths, bananas, and dark grapes.

  Terman went into the dining room and returned empty-handed, something else impelling him, something he couldn’t remember or had never quite known.

  “Wasn’t my fruit any good?” she asked.

  He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes to seven—another day irretrievably gone. “When are they coming back?” he asked, the question rhetorical.

  She shook her head in a self-amused way, smiling charmingly at him. “I wonder if you could get me an aperitif,” she said.

  Fixed on something else, he only partly heard her request, wary of her demands, thinking that no matter the language she was asking him to make love to her.

  “I’d like something to warm me up,” she said.

  They could hear Sylvie upstairs talking on the phone in French, complaining about something.

  Marjorie put her finger over her lips, enjoining him to silence. When Sylvie’s conversation was completed, Marjorie said, “You are forgetful, you know. I’m worried about you.”

  Sylvie came downstairs, stuck her head in the room then disappeared somewhere outside.

  Terman poured a glass of Rafael for Marjorie and made himself a Scotch, not bothering to put in ice or water, wanting to feel the heat of the liquor in his chest. He tossed down the drink and poured himself a second, before delivering the aperitif to Marjorie.

  She acknowledged his service with a wink. “Would you change the compress on my ankle, my friend?” she asked in her peremptory way. “You don’t really mind, do you?”

  He was unwrapping the compress when he heard a car pull into the driveway and he momentarily observed himself, bent devotedly over her outstretched leg, from the viewpoint of someone coming in them. “The swelling is down,” he said. “It can’t be too serious.”

  “My dear, everything is too serious,” she said with a wink. “It’s such a bore, isn’t it?” It was as if an understanding had been established between them, an unacknowledged intimacy.

  After dinner Terman sought out Isabelle who was sitting some distance from him at the large table. “I’m going back to London,” he whispered. “There’s no more for me to do here.”

  “I understand,” she said coldly.

  “Would you like to go?”

  “Are you asking me to come with you?”

  He noticed that Marjorie, leaning on a cane by the kitchen door, was watching them.

  “That’s what I’m asking,” he said. “I don’t understand what else you thought.”

  “Are we having a fight?” she asked.

  “Let’s go into another room and talk.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said, brushing off his arm.

  He walked away, then came back to her. “It would please me if you came along,” he said.

  She followed him outside to the car, neither consenting nor refusing, smiling apologetically to whomever she passed. Marjorie was watching them from the kitchen.

  “You look very sexy tonight,” he said. He was holding the passenger door open for her (or for anyone) when he had an intuition that someone was observing them from the woods just beyond the garden.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said, “but I have to get my things first and say goodbye to the others, which will take a few minutes. Is that all right? I know how impatient you get, but it’s not my nature to accept people’s hospitality without thanking them.”

  He sat in the car and watched her walk back toward the house, full of frail determination, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that he hadn’t gone off without her.

  Max came out after several minutes, followed by Isabelle who turned around to say something in the doorway to someone else. He heard Marjorie’s authoritative voice, heard his name mentioned.

  “Wish we could have had more time together,” Max was saying, his face at the window like a Halloween mask, “but as I’ve told you more than you want to hear I’m not my own man.” He let himself into the back seat of the car, lowered his voice to the sympathetic tone he used for playing the good guy, the one who i
f not pressured by forces outside his control would give Terman everything he wanted. Terman, seeking comfort, let himself be gulled. It was not what Max said that was so persuasive but the undiguised need to persuade that worked its charm.

  “The women are watching us,” Max said. “Regard.”

  Indeed, Marjorie and Isabelle—Marjorie leaning on her cane-were standing silently just inside the doorway, looking out at the car. “What did Marjorie say to you about me?” he asked.

  “I don’t think your name ever came up,” Terman said.

  “You did spend some time with her, did you? And she had nothing, either good or bad, to say about yours truly?”

  The two women, Marjorie’s hand at the small of Isabelle’s back, approached them.

  “A bit frightening, the two of them in tandem, don’t you think?”

  Isabelle looked into the back seat where Max was sitting and said hello.

  “We’re talking shop,” Max said.

  “Are you?” said Marjorie, offering them a road show version of her unconvincingly merciless grande dame. “I had the impression that Terman and Isabelle were going to London and we had come to the car to say goodbye to them.”

  “I’m sitting in the car,” Max said, “so if Terman and Isabelle drive off they’ll have to take me along as bloody hostage.”

  “He doesn’t get drunk like other people,” Marjorie explained to Isabelle, “he merely behaves oddly.”

  “Is it odd, I ask you, to have a conference with my conspirator? We’ll put the question to Isabelle whose biases are either unknown or non-existent.”

  “When Terman makes up his mind to go somewhere, he wants to be at that place in the flash of an eye,” Isabelle said. “That’s the way he is, I’m afraid.”

  “Are you in a hurry, son?” Max asked. “Is there time for a word or two between us?”

  “It’s cold as a witch’s tit,” Marjorie said. “I’m going back to the cottage if no one minds.” She blew them a kiss then turned to go, though didn’t.

  “I’ll help you back,” Isabelle said, taking her arm.

  Marjorie pulled away, said she preferred making it on her own if that didn’t interfere with anyone else’s plans. She took four maybe five steps and fell heavily. Neither of the men got out of the car. Isabelle hurried to her and asked Marjorie, who was making an effort not to cry, if she hurt herself. “I feel like letting out an enormous scream,” Marjorie said.

  “One of us ought to go out there,” Max said. “It would be a great favor to me, Terman, if you represented the partnership on this occasion. Just tell her that Max sent you, that you’ve come in place of Max.”

  Marjorie was on her feet, moving unsteadily toward the house, Isabelle followed protectively a step behind. “No need,” Marjorie said over her shoulder.

  Terman opened his window to call to either or both of the women, but could think of nothing he wanted to say.

  He looked into the rearview mirror and noted that Max was slumped like a ragdoll against the back of the seat. “Are you all right, Max?” he asked. There was no answer for the longest time. “Max!”

  The eyes opened with apparent reluctance, or offered that illusion in the dark. The voice boomed in the closed space. “Why don’t you wait until the morning, old son?” it said. “Nothing useful or enobling can be done at this time of blight. Am I not speaking truth?” He let himself out of the car, opened his fly and peed in a wide arc toward the house. “Serve them right if they get a whiff of that.”

  Terman could hardly make out the numbers on his watch, studying its unillumined face in the dark car, refusing to turn on the light or open the door. He squalled Isabelle’s name through the partially opened window and thought he heard it echo back after a time lapse of several seconds. It was possible that he heard Tom crawling through the brush like a commando, gradually approaching the car, stopping every few minutes to disguise his progress. The gun was in his hand as he crawled, held just above the ground so as not to get fouled by dirt or twigs. In two more sequences, he would be close enough to open fire at the silhouette in the driver’s seat.

  The assassin in the woods rested for a count of five—Terman counting the seconds to himself as he imagined the other doing—then crawled the final thirty feet to the garden’s edge.

  A few seconds later, he heard footsteps and he threw himself across the seat, hands over his head, to avoid the gunshots he anticipated. There were a series of raps like machine gun fire at some great distance. Isabelle’s face was at the opposing window, slightly distorted by his perspective.

  “You don’t mean to sleep in the car, darling, do you?” she was saying. She opened the door on the passenger side to make herself understood.

  He lifted his head to give her space to sit down, unable to give up the idea that an assassin awaited him just outside the window of the car. When she was seated and had closed the door he put his head in her lap.

  “If we’re not going to London,” she said, “we ought to go inside, don’t you think?”

  He could smell her sea-scent beneath the wool of her pants—the wool rough agaist his face—mingling with her perfume and something else, something not quite defineable. The pants had a fly and he worked the zipper open with his teeth.

  She slapped at the back of his head, half reprimand, half play. “Mind,” she said.

  Her smell had depths like a well-aged wine, though seemed somewhat murky as if it hadn’t travelled well or had been shaken up in transport. She wore a bikini under the mannish pants, an odd conjunction, an aspect (he thought) of disguise.

  Terman had not thought of Isabelle as overpoweringly sexy before, was never so taken with her as this moment in the car with his head like some rooting animal buried in her crotch.

  Isabelle offered no encouragement, even held the back of his neck with her hand as if (though not seriously) to restrain him from going further. He found an arm cramped under him and he used it, despite the stiffness in his shoulder, the numbness of the tips of his fingers, to open her pants at the waist. She murmured something, neither assent nor complaint, some English cry or sigh he had never understood. He thought of it, if he thought of anything, as getting to the bottom of Isabelle.

  Intoxicated by her scent, his nose, that surrogate pointer, forced its way between her legs. The scent had not even its usual pleasure for him—something murky and contravening in it—yet he pursued it with some urgency, tracked it to its source.

  The taste was different too this time—she opened for him to taste, her first compliance in the cramped silence—like a great wine twenty years past its peak, not quite gone bad though beginning to turn.

  At any moment a gunshot might come through the window and tear off the top of his head. He thought of that, or the thought touched the edge of consciousness, as he supped at her well. For that space of awareness, he sucked on terror, dying and reviving, frightened to death.

  She wanted him on top of her, she whispered, and he was aware at least for that moment that she was there too.

  He was, oddly, in no special hurry and she had to tug on his arm to bring him to her, to remind him of her request. And that too, the fucking itself, was as good as he could remember it. He said or meant to say it, his mouth at her ear, hearing gunshots in his dreams as he slept, his weight centered on her.

  The bullet took a devious path, wound itself around his head before going in one ear and coming out the other.

  It was almost four AM when she woke him, the time in his head corresponding to the clock in the car. She was buttoning his shirt, though that may only have been the last part of it, his pants already restored, fly closed, belt buckled.

  When he was finally awake—who could say how long it took?—he felt lightened and refreshed. He started up the car without a word to Isabelle, without even the barest acknowledgement. She curled up in her seat and he covered her with his jacket, his tenderness lasting only for the duration of the gesture. He had woken angry, its object undefined.

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nbsp; The night yielded by degrees. He was more than halfway to London when the cause of his anger clarified, the message deciphering itself as he drove. Isabelle had slept with Max, said intuition, and intuition almost never deceived him. He felt disappointment, not much more than that, grieved privately at the insufficiency of his passion. I ought to break Max in half, he thought. And if not Max, who?

  Isabelle was asleep when he arrived at the Holland Park house and he left her as she was—a light coming from the second floor study he wanted to investigate—to go inside. “Don’t leave me,” she called after him as he returned to the car in delayed response.

  In sleep, she appeared childlike and fragile, an innocent, unprotected by the disguises of will.

  He had difficulty waking her. When he whispered her name a shadow of pain scarred her face. Her eyes opened and closed like a doll’s eyes.

  “What do you want?” she asked, mildly indignant.

  “Do you want me to carry you in?” he asked.

  “I should say not,” she said, sitting up stiffly, moving her hair out of her eyes. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I never fall asleep in cars.”

  Isabelle hurried ahead of him into the house.

  She would have said something to him, had something on her mind, but thought to go upstairs first to take a bath.

  The delay frustrated him. He wanted the ritual of her confession (and his forgiveness) out of the way so that they could get on to something else.

  They had barely exchanged a word since he had wakened her, the silence echoing. The unspoken secret rankled.

  Terman was conscious of what he did only in the moment of its doing, taunted afterward by the consequences of unremembered actions. The cry of the kettle disconcerted him—he had no sense of having gone into the kitchen to put up water for tea—thought in his distraction that there was a child in the house or an aggrieved cat.

  “Tea or coffee?” he called up the stairs. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear the sound of a voice, something to confirm his presence in the world.

  On the way upstairs, he forgot about the boiled water in the kitchen, the question of tea or coffee, the sound of Isabelle’s voice or anyone else’s, and directed himself to his study, the only room he felt at home in. It was not as if he didn’t know what he would find or not find when he pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk. It was merely that he had to see for himself again and again, had to hold illusion only to court disillusion. A quixotic belief in the infinite possibilities of restoration compelled him. Surprises were never a surprise. He found a toy pistol in the very place he had kept the real one, a mock redemption, a menacing joke. He studied the imitation disbelievingly, half-thought that the original gun had been false too—everything on close inspection was false—though he knew that wasn’t the case. It was at that moment he decided that he could not be at ease with himself until Tom returned home.