My Father More or Less

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “You will never leave him,” Emile said with barely the trace of an accent.

  “I will. I will,” she said with exaggerated passion. Her manner included an awareness of self-parody.

  They had their tea—Marjorie had brought cream cakes from Fortnum and Mason—in the large gloomy kitchen. There was a scene like it in the movie, “Ceremony of Night”—two men and a woman having tea in that very kitchen, one the woman’s stepfather, the other her lover.

  Henry Berger is aware as he enters the Florentine villa that he has been set up by his own people, has been marked for assassination. What he doesn’t know is that a friend and former colleague is the intended assassin.

  At some point Emile departed the kitchen on some unannounced mission. Marjorie took the occasion to ask Terman if he didn’t think the actor was beautiful.

  “I suppose so,” Terman said, “though it’s not my line.”

  “Isn’t that just the kind of thing a man would say,” she said. “I have no difficulty appreciating female beauty—your little friend, Isabelle, for example—without it being quite in my line you know.”

  He admired her largeness of spirit, he said.

  “He’s tres jeune, but in important ways mature beyond his years.”

  “He’s been around a long time,” Terman said. “I only wondered why you brought him along.”

  “I’m flaunting him,” she said. “Is that what you think? Flaunting or flouting—I’m never quite sure which is the right word.” Her leg brushed his or his hers, an accident in which no one admitted being hurt. She said with the cup of tea at her lips, “I’ll send him away if you like.”

  A woman comes into the parlor and offers Henry Berger a cup of tea, which he declines. Beyond the offer of tea, she makes no comment and might have been a servant or the lady of the house with equal plausibility.

  When Emile returned she escorted him into another room and Terman, if he made the effort, could hear the murmur of their conversation. It was as though two or three bees had gathered at a closed window to conspire.

  Henry Berger sits with his hat in his lap—it is a hat one has rarely seen him wear, a gray stetson from another time. He is waiting for his host to appear.

  Emile, who had aged in the intervening minutes, returned to the kitchen to announce the necessity of his departure, some tiresome business with a producer that had slipped his mind. “My pleasure,” he said, offering Terman his hand as though it were meant to be kissed. “We will meet again it is my hope.”

  Terman had seen him in a film at the NFT about three weeks ago—it struck him when the actor said “it is my hope”—an Italian western in which Emile had played one of the two principal villains. He had a breathtaking death scene, somersaulting in air from a blast of gunfire.

  The door opens behind him and Henry Berger stands up, turning in no particular hurry to see his friend, Adriano, stride in with outstretched hand, greeting him with an old ¡oke they had once shared. A shadow passes over Henry Berger’s face, a mingling of disappointment and disbelief. Perhaps the information he had been given is incorrect or imcomplete and this friend, this partner of his early days, is not the one assigned to terminate his career.

  Emile was gone. Marjorie indicated Emile’s absence with a wave of her purple scarf as if, by some feat of prestidigitation, she had caused the actor to vanish into air. “The great thing about him,” she confided, “is that he is not in the least way possessive.”

  Emile’s disappearance, that well-managed trick, put Terman under a certain obligation to Marjorie, an obligation he had no intention of making known. Each was walking on a cane and Terman thought of them as a matched pair, a remark he heard himself make to his companion, one that pleased him more in consideration than in echo.

  They sit facing each other on opposing brown velvet sofas, an octagonal marble table between them. “Is this splendid place yours?” Henry Berger asks him. “Adriano looks around him, assessing his apparent domain. “Would you like a guided tour, old friend? There are more rooms than I ever learned to count.” “I’m stunned with admiration,” says Henry Berger. “I’ve had a little luck,” says Adriano, motioning to Berger to follow him. “As you probably heard, I retired from the profession a little over three years ago.”

  “I feel as if I’ve given up,” Terman said, “only there’s no one appropriate around to whom I might surrender.”

  “You poor man,” Marjorie said. “If you want to surrender your sword to me, I’ll find some use for it.”

  He took her hand, a transient possession he had no recollection of having acquired, and brought it to his lips. She blushed at the gesture, touched to confusion.

  Terman was prey to unobjectified sexual hungers that surged and receded like the tides. An aspect of his fragmentation, he found himself susceptible to Marjorie, whose charms up until the present moment had the weightlessness of myth.

  “I find this conversation odd in the extreme,” she said.

  There is an army of people in the house all pretending not to be there, faces at the windows like faded posters. Henry Berger pretends not to notice the things he sees, follows his old friend through a maze of extraordinary rooms. If the international detective feels his life in some danger, his manner gives no indication of it. More disturbing even than the danger is the apparent treachery of his old friend, who is so ingratiating as he shows him about. Where will he make his move? he wonders. He knows the friend well enough to know that he will not leave the business to a henchman. Adriano leads him out onto a elegant terrace, invites the detective to admire the panoramic view, the mountain stream below, the gray gnarled cliffs which frame the villa on three sides like outer walls. “The vista is most admirable from the south-east,” says the friend, leading Henry Berger to a corner of the terrace, stepping back as if to offer him the spectacular vista as a gift. This is where he intends to do it, thinks Berger.

  She sat with her legs tucked under her, holding a cigarette she only on rare occasion brought to her lips. Terman came back from the kitchen with a bottle of Muscadet and two champagne glasses. “I like that idea,” she said. She rose to her knees, put her arms around his neck and kissed him, the cigarette held behind his head.

  The phone was ringing and she called his attention to it but he merely shook his head. “Mightn’t it be important?” she asked.

  His hand was shaking. “I’d quite like to go into the room with all the mirrors,” she said. “That doesn’t offend you, I hope. I’ve always adored that room, though I can see that it might be pall after a while once you’ve had the initial frisson.”

  The phone had stopped ringing, but after a few minutes interval began again. “I wish to hell you’d answer it,” she said. He took her cigarette from between her fingers and tossed it into the fireplace. “Don’t do that,” she whispered. “I don’t like things taken out of my hands.” The phone was still ringing as they went up the stairs, could be heard now from one of the rooms on the second floor in muffled counterpoint to the ringing downstairs. “Do you know who it is?” she asked him, poking him with her cane. They dueled briefly on the steps, each holding on with one hand to the bannister behind. He knocked her cane from her hand, sent it sprawling over the bannister to the floor below. She gave out a small cry of pain, more shock than pain. The phone stopped then started again. “The room I’m talking about is on the third floor, isn’t it?” she said.

  This is where he intends to do it, thinks Berger. The old friend is standing a step behind and to the left, has not yet revealed his intention, speaks of the capacity of the landscape to change in different light. “We all change in different light.” says the detective. The dark young woman who offered him tea on his entrance, steps out onto the terrace carrying a bowl of olives. Two cars drive up to the other side of the house. “The note I received said you had some information for me,” says the detective. “You’ve been stepping on too many toes,” says Adriano. “There are some people in high places that might wish you out o
f the way.” They are facing each other, the hat in Henry Berger’s hand held out in front of him. The old friend points to something in the distance while moving his other hand into the pocket of his coat. Henry Berger fires first, his gun under his hat. The impact of the shot sends the friend careening into the side of the villa, his mouth a broken line, eyes frozen open in astonishment. The woman drops the bowl of olives, covers her mouth with her hand. Berger’s hat sails over the railing into the ravine below. The detective stands over the fallen Adriano, his gun still drawn. Adriano beckons him with a finger and Berger leans toward him, “One always pays for weakness in the end,” Adriano whispers, a gun in his hand pointing at Berger.

  The door to the room with the mirrors was closed, a Do Not Disturb notice, the kind used in certain hotels, on the knob of the door, an irrelevancy which nevertheless caused Terman some hesitation. “Is something wrong, luv?” Marjorie asked. He put his ear to the door, listened to heart beat and pulse, the breathing of moths. “Who’s in there?” she whispered, leaning over him, the point of a breast pressed to his back like a knife. “What are we supposed to be listening for?” she asked. “This is all terribly amusing.”

  When he had pushed the door open he was surprised by the fierce unshaven figure coming at him in the mirror. When he turned away for respite the same unenviable figure approached him from another side, and still another.

  After she had removed her blouse, mocked on all sides by ghostly imitators, Marjorie said, “It’s the kind of bizarre joke my husband would play on one, isn’t it? Was that what you had in mind?”

  “In this room one gets overwhelmed by self,” he said.

  Marjorie told a story of how Max had invited some people to a dinner party at their old flat in Knightsbridge and had absented himself before the guests arrived. He had hidden himself somewhere in the diminutive five room flat and the object of the evening was to discover his hiding place. After searching in vain for four or five hours, the guests decided that they were being hoaxed. Marjore had them step out into the hall for five minutes and when she ushered them back Max was waiting for them in the living room. Not only had he been able to avoid discovery, he had also managed to film the search from wherever he was hidden.

  “Did they ever get any dinner?” Terman asked.

  “You know I don’t remember if they did or not,” Marjorie said, “though I can’t imagine we’d let them go home without any food.”

  “Perhaps they ate and searched at the same time,” he said.

  A sudden wind caused the door to the room, which had been ajar, to slam shut.

  “I nearly jumped out of my skin,” said Marjorie, who had already divested herself of her clothes.

  Terman recalled that the door to this room tended to stick, which was one of the reasons the room was rarely used. He could almost remember Max warning him about the door sticking at some inappropriate time in the legendary past.

  Marjorie’s anecdote had conjured Max’s presence.

  “It’s a bit dazzling, isn’t it,” she was saying, “seeing yourself like that. One is never absolutely sure if it’s oneself or someone else.”

  Terman kept his eyes closed, spooked by the repetition of images around him, the redundancy of forms. He could imagine the scene being filmed, image within image within image, the camera image no more than a reflection of itself. He wondered if their reflections could fuck while they remained spectators to the event.

  “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Marjorie said. “We could just sit here and talk if you prefer.”

  Unless the mirrors lied, he was already lodged between her legs. “You’re very sexy,” he said to her.

  “I get off on seeing myself,” she whispered. She was articulate to a fault, a scholar of variation, almost every gesture perfectly phrased.

  He had a sudden longing to return home, to return to America, that unsceptered continent, to be among people again that spoke the same language.

  He had been feigning madness, he thought, or was the pretence itself also madness? Hamlet faced the same dilemma.

  Their reflections, he noticed—eyes open for the moment—betrayed more passion, more erotic pleasure, than the supposed originals.

  “They expect me to kill you and for that reason I won’t,” Adriano says. “I won’t do their housecleaning for them this time.”

  ‘“Who’s they?” Henry Berger asks.

  “I want you to promise me you won’t let them hurt Claudia,” he says, coughing spasmodically, a trickle of blood at the side of his lips.

  “Who gives you your orders, Adriano?”

  The dying man’s lips quiver at the effort of speech, flutter like boneless fingers. “I promise I’ll see to Claudia,” Berger says.

  Terman lay in bed like a corpse, hands folded across his chest, while Marjorie watched her reflection dress wherever she turned, all sides of her given credence. “You might say something kind,” she said.

  He wrote himself two lines of dialogue. “You insist on people acting according to some scheme that exists solely in your head. We’re all characters in your novel, Marjorie.”

  “I expect I want to hear that you’ve had a lovely time,” she said.

  A third line of dialogue offered itself. “If I said that at your prompting, Marjorie, how could you possible believe it?”

  “Trust me, luv.”

  He perceived himself reaching across the bed to offer some gesture of affection, but in fact he made no such move, made no move at all.

  She studied him in the mirror, in the various mirrors, then sat down on the edge of the bed with her back to him. “I think someone must have broken your heart,” she said icily.

  He roused himself from his torpor. “If Max were a really smart man, he would never leave home,” he said.

  “It’s a start,” she said. “Small and incomplete, though not entirely loathsome.”

  His sleeping prick arose and lifted the covers like the spine of a tent. There was nothing to do for it, no will to accompany its purpose. In a moment or two (perhaps an hour had passed—the man in bed had no sense of time), Marjorie was at the door, negotiating the handle to no effect. He watched her in the opposing mirror.

  She cursed the door, kicked at it, promised it the full burden of her wrath.

  He planned to get up and help her—there was a trick to the door, you had to push it in to get it out—imagined himself lifting the covers and stepping out of the bed.

  She pulled at the handle, turned it both ways, stopped then started again abruptly as if she might deceive the door into releasing her. Terman perceived her as a character in a comic film.

  “Bloody bitch of door,” she yelled, laughing at herself. She joined him at the bed, the reflections from the four walls of mirrors multiplying her. “Please help me, luv,” she said. “The door won’t let me out.”

  Having forgotten their initial combat and its attendant disappointments, he invited her under the covers for a rematch, heard himself speak the words, witnessed the movement of his mouth in one of the mirrors.

  “Haven’t you had enough of that?” she asked. “Besides, I have to go, I really do. Is that bloody awful of me, darling?”

  “Whatever you say,” he said.

  “It will have to be a quicky-wicky,” she said. She removed her off-white pants with the wide cuffs and folded them over the back of a chair, posed for him in the box of mirrors.

  When she stripped him of the blanket he shivered from the draft, from a sense of irremediable cold.

  The thought struck her, interrupted a separate intention. “It would be just like dear old Max to lock us in,” she said. “He has a sense of fun that would make the Marquis de Sade envious.”

  Max came and went, entered the room and exited without the opening of a door.

  Marjorie, surveying the landscape, considered the choices before them. “It’ll have to be quick as a wink,” she said, reminding them both. She sucked him with lady-like dispatch, a woman
of passionate constraints, restored his tower the moment it began to lean. Then she sat on him, facing away, encouraging him to push forward as if he meant to dislodge her. “I always think of it as riding a horse,” she said.

  She made quick work of him as promised; he was gone before he had so much as arrived. He dreamed someone was in the house, was walking deliberately up the steps, gun in hand. He would have gone to sleep, how easy that was, how right-seeming, but she pulled on his arm until he climbed out of bed. Of course, the door needed opening, required his touch.

  “This is the way you do it,” he said. He pushed the door in, leaned his shoulder against the frame, then turned the handle down and pulled sharply toward him in one precise infallible gesture.

  “It didn’t open,” she said, laughing nervously. “Is it panic time?”

  He tried again without measurable success, embarrassed at his failure. Marjorie walked back and forth from bed to door, generating energy.

  “Is someone downstairs?” Marjorie asked, hearing the echo of her own steps.

  “It could be Isabelle,” he said.

  “Will she make a fuss, do you think? I’ll say you were showing me the house and the door got stuck.” Marjorie threw his clothes at him, worked at straightening the bed. “Don’t just stand there,” she shouted in a mock-whisper, “Oh, God, I broke a fingernail.” Holding the finger to her mouth, sucking on it. A single tear escaped her eye and made its way down her cheek.

  Adriano is trying to say something, is marshalling his strength for one last effort. “Trust no one,” he mutters. There are footsteps at the door to the terrace and Berger points his gun at the narrow passageway. A gun comes through the terrace door followed by an arm, followed by the figure of a uniformed police officer. “No trouble,” says Henry Berger. The old friend in his arms is unconscious, and he puts him down, never for a moment letting the armed policeman out of his sight.

  Terman sat at the edge of the bed, picking at a knot in one of his shoelaces, while Marjorie had her ear to the door. From the vantage of the ceiling mirror, they presented a study in angles. “Whoever it is, walks like a cat burglar,” she said.