My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

  It was my father’s third novel—third or fourth—and was an edition (Panther) I’d never seen before. The blurb said, “A painful dreamlike searing work somewhere between Malone Dies and The Maltese Falcon:”

  Though I was momentarily unobserved, I would have liked some other people in the shop to deflect attention from me. I had the feeling that the woman at the desk was more aware of me then she pretended. The point was to disguise my intention, though I could have pocketed the book without her noticing, and I continued methodically down the shelves, stopping from time to time to look through a book I had no interest in at all.

  “Is there anything in particular that you’re looking for?” she asked without seeming to raise her head.

  It was at the moment of her question that someone else came in the shop, announced by the bell, a tall stoop-shouldered, white-haired man, elegantly dressed.

  The man walked up to the desk and asked for something in a confidential voice. He couldn’t have helped more had we worked out the details of his entrance in advance.

  “I’ve seen it around somewhere,” the woman said doubtfully. “That’s one of those items that’s never around for long.”

  She wrote something down on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk to him.

  My back shielding me from view, I slipped the copy of my father’s book from shelf to jacket pocket while appearing to be absorbed in another book altogether.

  I trembled with excitement, literally trembled. It was always that way the first few minutes I had taken something. Once I got out of the store with it, the excitement tended to pale, the stolen article without satisfaction in itself. The woman was staring at me, seemed knowing, her pursed lips tasting that knowledge. It was only suspicion I warned myself. She couldn’t have seen me pocket the book. Still, there might have been something in my manner that gave me away, a guilty look, something of the kind. I smiled at her, made that effort, said I thought she had one of the nicest bookstores in London.

  “Do you really?” she asked in a somewhat supercilious voice.

  I nodded, turned to go, took an uneasy step toward the door, persuaded myself of my innocence. My first step was less authoritative than usual, seemed unsure of its ultimate destination.

  I turned back once again, “Do you have a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?” I asked.

  “Not at the moment,” she said. “Is there really such a work?”

  I had my hand on the door handle.

  Someone—I assumed the woman—was coming up behind me, was a step or two behind. The trick was not to panic, to behave in an ordinary way, to concern myself with the details of opening the door and stepping outside.

  I had the idea of taking off her glasses, as the hero of an old-fashioned movie might do, and kissing her on the mouth.

  “How you take my breath away!” she might say.

  It turned out to be the man behind me, the expensively dressed white-haired man, which was not the relief I expected it to be. After I stepped out, I held the door for him which he acknowledged with an unintelligible mumble.

  I went around the next corner before reaching in my jacket pocket to claim my prize. My hand was trembling again, in the throes of some self-contained desire. The tips of my fingers were close to numb.

  I had been uncharacteristically careless, had stuffed the book in the pocket with the gun, making the bulge even more ostentatious than it had been.

  The man who had come out of the store behind me (and had gone, I thought, in the opposite direction) was coming up the street toward me. I turned my back to him and shoved my hands in my pockets, holding the book in one of them.

  He came up to me and said Hello, asked if I was an American. I didn’t deny it, though I didn’t affirm it either. “Do I look like an American?”

  “I heard you say something in the shop,” he said, “but I recognized you as an American even before that. Incidentally, I wouldn’t go back to that shop if I were you.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Not if I were in your booties, young man.”

  He seemed too well-dressed to be a policeman, but I supposed he could be a judge or the head of Scotland Yard retired, some direct or indirect representative of the processes of retribution. I was trying to think of something to say that would justify my taking the book.

  “What are you doing in London?” he asked.

  It was not a question I knew how to answer. “Passing through,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s a good answer. When I was in the states, not so long ago in point of fact, I thought of my time there in the very same choice of language.” He rubbed his large hands together as if the circulation had stopped. “A bit chilly, isn’it? Rain in the air, I should guess. Summer in London is the season that never quite arrives. Why don’t we go inside to continue our chat if you have no objection. I have a flat not five minutes from here or we could go to a restaurant and have some lunch.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, not sure whether I had any real choice in the matter.

  My tenuous refusal caused him no apparent dismay. “Another time, shall we?” he said, taking a card from his wallet. He appeared to study the text for a few minutes before handing it over, holding it away from me for the longest possible time. “If you want someone to talk to,” he said, “there’s no stigma in being lonely—feel free to call me. Is that agreeable?”

  I shrugged modestly, an indicaton that I didn’t really understand the language he was speaking. Anything that got me away at the moment was agreeable. I half-turned to go, though waited for him to dismiss me, a good boy despite opposing evidence.

  He took something from his pocket and held it in his hand so I couldn’t see it. “You won’t do anything foolish like that again, will you?” he said.

  A shrug was the only assurance I had to offer. My eyes pleaded innocent to his veiled charge.

  “I’d like you to make me that promise,” he said. “Will you do that?”

  “I promise I won’t do anything foolish,” I said in an inexpressive voice, squirming, feeling the gun in my pocket next to the book.

  He laughed the way some people clear their throats. “You have renounced foolishness, have you?” he said.

  I affected sincerity, which was not to say I was insincere, said unblinkingly that I had given him the promise he had asked me for.

  “I don’t believe you mean it,” he said as if he thought my disingenuousness amusing. “Is that unfair?” His hand was in his pocket, clutching real or imaginary handcuffs.

  “Who’s talking about fairness?” I said, an involuntary quip, which produced a second laugh, less grudging than the first. I was warming to my audience.

  We walked two blocks together, though I wasn’t sure who was going in whose direction, during which time he gave me a lecture on what I assumed to be the disadvantages of shop-lifting. Yet he was so oblique in his approach I couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t alluding to something else altogether.

  All of the time we walked—his purposes as obscure to me as his conversation—I wanted nothing more than to get away from him.

  “I have to go,” I suddenly blurted out.

  “Which way?” he asked.

  There was of course no place at which I was expected, though I gave him a story about being interviewed for a job as an usher at a West End theater.

  “What time do you have to be there?” he asked.

  Thinking that it was about ten thirty, I said without hesitation that I had to be at the theater at eleven o’clock.

  He laughed, put his arm on my shoulder. “You’ve already missed that appointment. Come, let’s go into a restaurant and have some lunch. It might be I know the chap you’re supposed to meet and can arrange another appointment for you.” He led me, his hand on my back steering me along, to an Italian restaurant called Mama Lucia. I went with him merely because it was easier than resisting. The truth was I was hungry (I hadn’t eaten breakfast and perhaps not even dinner the night before)
and the old gentleman seemed to have more money than he knew how to spend.

  When the menu came I had difficulty locating something I wanted. I professed to have no appetite.

  “Let me order for you,” said my patron. “I know the kind of thing they do best.”

  He ordered for us both, ordered in Italian so I had a vague and mostly mistaken notion of what he had chosen for me. I hadn’t wholly relinquished the idea that he had taken me in custody (was this my last meal?) for the theft of my father’s book. At the same time, it was clear to me I was free to get up and leave if the impulse took me.

  At the outset, before we had been seated, there was difficulty about my wearing my jacket (my thrift shop U.S. Army field jacket) to the table, my host suggesting that I give it to the checkroom girl. But I said I never took it off, a remark he seemed to enjoy, clearing his odd laugh from his throat.

  I felt my assertion of not being hungry, which was only true the moment before it was spoken, as an obligation to self-denial. I withheld appetite, picked over my food with hard-earned indifference.

  I had never been into wine, though dutifully drank whatever was put in my glass. We had red wine with the antipasto and white wine with the main dish, which was some unidentifiable meat stuffed with creamed spinach and some relative of ham.

  The wine affected me like an anesthetic. The more I drank the more paralyzed I got, my conversation reducing itself to mumbles and asides.

  I was supposed to be funny—it was his idea of me—and I did what I could to sustain an overrated reputation.

  “If you’re really interested in a job,” he said at some point, “maybe I could do something for you.”

  “As long as it doesn’t require killing anyone,” I said, a remark that struck me as extremely amusing when I made it. I laughed nervously to cover the pall of his silence.

  “So you draw the line at murder, do you?” he said. “One ought to draw the line somewhere, I suppose.”

  “I’m very good at drawing lines and waiting on queues,” I said. This idiocy provoked a small, disheartened laugh from my patron.

  For no reason I could say, I was cutting the meat on my plate in microscopic pieces. It took ten mouthfuls, I estimated, to achieve an ordinary two or three. My host tried not to notice or not to seem to notice.

  A second bottle of white wine was uncorked and my glass refilled. I emptied the glass as if it were medicine, persuaded in my sodden state that the gesture was amusing to my audience.

  I could imagine the grotesque impression I was making, though couldn’t stop what I was doing, had no clear idea what it was. The job was not mentioned again in the next few minutes and I was willing to believe my host had reconsidered his offer. Just when I thought I had offended him beyond repair he handed me his card and said I was to call him whenever I was ready. Meaning ready to go to work? I didn’t ask.

  I found myself calling him sir—I put the card away without reading his name—and thought that was wrong somehow (my voice had a satirical edge), though he seemed to have no objection. He called me sir in return and occasionally son. I couldn’t remember if I mentioned my name to him or even if he had asked for it. I don’t think anything I told him was precisely the truth.

  “Will you have some dessert, son?” he asked.

  I was still working at the meat, picking at it like a sore. “I don’t think so, sir,” I said, a parody of the polite young man. “I never know what I want until after I’ve had it.”

  My host lit a cigar, glanced at his watch, drummed his fingers on the table. There was a hum of impatience in his manner, a feeling of disappointment. I knew it like the back of my hand. He felt he had made a mistake in taking me to lunch and was anxious to get on to something else.

  I asked him what he did, what kind of work if any.

  He waved the question away as if it were the smoke from someone else’s cigar. “I do what needs doing,” he said. The waiter, who may have also been the owner, shadowed my plate, waiting for me to turn my head.

  The veal—I had become confident of its identity—had long since turned chilly, though I had some stake, or thought I had, in eating a few more pieces, a way of nullifying the effects of the wine.

  “He’s finished,” my host said in the manner of a man who knew the gods by their first names. The waiter gave a sigh of relief and cleared my plate.

  I mourned the loss of my uneaten meal. That was no way to treat a guest, I thought.

  “Will there be anything else, gentlemen?” the waiter asked.

  “Just the bill thank you,” said my host, filling my glass with what remained of the second bottle of white wine.

  I drank slowly this time, pretending to savor the wine I could no longer really taste.

  I caught his glance when I looked up. He seemed to be studying me. “What kind of job did you have in mind?” I asked. I yawned, felt weighted with tiredness.

  The old gentleman asked with undisguised distaste if I was going to be sick—my head was on the table or close enough to it to offer that suspicion—and I heard myself answer, “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  He raised himself to his full height, paid the check and seemed to leave the restaurant, but then he was standing over me again. I had the idea he had gone around in a revolving door. “I can’t leave you here like this, son,” he said.

  He held out his hand and when I realized what he had in mind, I took hold and rose to my feet. Muffling a belch, I preceded him in a snaky line to the door. The waiter, who seemed to have nothing better to do, followed in our wake, forming a small procession. He was carrying something on a plate and it struck me that it was my gun, that it had fallen from my jacket and he had rescued it. “Where’s he going with that?” I asked the old man. Then, wanting to make sure of things, I shoved my hand in my pocket and brought out the gun for the briefest of airings, my father’s novel dislodged in the process. The gun had been there all the time.

  When I recovered the book I stuffed it in a different pocket of my field jacket. There were some shocked glances in the restaurant but no direct mention was made of the pistol. What could my host have possibly thought? I offered neither acknowledgement nor explanation.

  “You have a visitor,” the landlady said the moment I came through the door.

  I never thought to ask who it was, went up the stairs carrying Mrs. Chepstow’s eyes on my back. My pockets were stuffed with the day’s loot.

  I called down to her. “Mrs. C, I don’t want anyone in my room when I’m not there.”

  The woman sidestepped complaints like a halfback, seemed able to disappear through one door or another at whim.

  The door to my room was shut and I knocked at it before entering, my other hand embracing the gun in my pocket.

  My visitor—it was odd how I mistook who it was—got up from my bed and poked her head forward to kiss me on the cheek. It was Astrid not Isabelle. She looked radiant and I almost supposed myself the occasion for it. The room—I hadn’t noticed it at first—had been fixed up a bit; there were yellow flowers in a blue vase on the rickety end table. My dirty clothes, mostly underwear and socks, had been moved into some discreet obscurity. It was not what I wanted, the improved-upon squalor, but I thanked her for her pains. She had appropriated the bed and I sat down in the room’s one chair which she had moved from one odd corner to another in an excess of zeal. The room was no less ugly for having been improved, its full-blown tackiness compromised by genteel aspiration.

  I looked around the room and wondered how anyone who didn’t hate himself could live in it, then I walked around as I sometimes do when I’m alone.

  She winked at me from my bed, her hands behind her head, asked if she was keeping me from doing something I had to do.

  The entire room took on the scent of her perfume, its own peculiar anonymity. Was I wrong in thinking she was wearing more of it than usual? I wanted her gone, though also felt rewarded by her uninvited visit.

  I apologized for the meagerness of the room,
said sometimes it grows on you. Sometimes not.

  “I think it’s cozy,” she said in a breathy voice, moistening her lips with her tongue.

  There was almost nothing she could do to rouse me in my present mood. I was indifferent to the taut outline of her birdlike breasts, the lacy hem of her slip, the thin pale thighs.

  “You seem to be miles away, Tommy,” she said. “In which direction are you traveling?”

  I heard, or thought I did, somone’s heavy foot on the stairs and put my ear to the door to listen. Astrid sat up and smoothed her short skirt over her knees.

  “What is it, Tommy?” she asked, hugging her knees. To entertain my guest, perhaps to frighten her too, I took out my father’s gun and stood behind the door, waiting for whoever it was to try to force his way in. I wondered what I would really do if the door swung open. Astrid giggled, put her hand over her mouth.

  The playacting began to depress me and I returned the gun to my pocket. I continued to sense that someone was there just beyond the door (Mrs. Chepstow or my father), positioned to eavesdrop, standing absolutely still to avoid discovery.

  Astrid tiptoed over, felt the outline of the gun against my side. Her question was unspoken.

  When we were outside, walking in the dreary rain, I was sorry I hadn’t gone to bed with her. I held her narrow hand as we walked.

  “You’re nicer now,” she whispered to me.

  She was wearing (why hadn’t I noticed before?) the scarf I had given her, a flowery thing I had picked up at Liberty’s in one of my earliest forays. I complimented her on it, though in fact it seemed to overwhelm her face.

  “When are you going to introduce me to your father?” Astrid asked. We, in fact, seemed to be walking in that direction.

  I suggested we go to Soho, the idea arriving the moment I announced it.