What Comes Next

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “No. Not really,” he said, drawing something in his notebook, his absorption intense. “No, I don’t. Do you?”

  “Look, Chris, if there isn’t anyone special you want to bring, then come alone. There’s no point making more out of it than necessary.”

  He looked at Parks, narrowing his eyes, then back at what ever he was drawing, his mouth curled grudgingly into a smile. “You didn’t answer what I asked.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Swinging his arm impatiently, Curt knocked a pile of books off his desk. “What didn’t I answer? If I missed the question …” Curt tried to see what he was drawing, but his hand, like a fat policeman, stood in his way.

  “You didn’t answer the question the first time because you didn’t want to,” he said matter-of-factly. “When there’s something you don’t want to talk about you pretend not to hear me.

  “It’s possible,” Curt admitted, annoyed at having a student criticize him, restraining his annoyance. “If I don’t tell you what you want to know, you can always ask your question again.”

  Watching Curt without looking at him, he tore the page from his notebook and crumpled it into a ball. “I know,” he said, and asked a question about treatment of prisoners during the war—something Curt had been talking about at the beginning of the session.

  “Is that the question you think I avoided answering?”

  Playing with it, he balanced the paper ball on the corner of the desk, flicked it forward with his index finger. Curt sensed, tensed with curiosity, that it was being left there for him like the flower. A voice interrupted his distraction. “Do you have a girl you see regularly that you’re fond of?” it asked. Curt groaned inwardly, his stomach knotting.

  “What kind of question is that? I’m a married man,” he heard himself answer, knowing all the time that he knew about Rosemary, had seen them together.

  Someone laughed, a jagged sound jumping from his throat. When it was gone, it had never been. The silence testified to itself. “Damn it,” Parks said, pounding on his desk. “Don’t be so hard on me.”

  “I have to go.” He jumped up from his chair, and as if in answer to something unsaid in the air, shrugged.

  Curt was tempted to confess, felt he ought to admit his evasion, if only to set his student a better example, but couldn’t. If he confessed, it would be because he had been caught in a lie and therefore not a real admission. As he looked to see what was wanted of him, willing to unburden himself if necessary, he discovered that there was no longer anyone there to hear him out. His office empty. I was in the wrong, he told himself. It won’t happen again.

  And then he thought, What business is it of his? He had been out of order (as Curt’s father would have put it) asking such a question. Nevertheless, Parks should have told him that the question was rude and presumptuous—out of order, in fact—and it would have ended there, their embarrassment avoided. And what if the student, smiling darkly to himself, had said, “How can you expect me to answer your questions if you refuse to answer mine, Mr. Parks?” He would have had to say lamely that they both had a right not to answer questions they felt violated their privacy. Even in his imagination he felt himself defeated by the student’s stance.

  It was some time later—driving Rosemary home—that Parks remembered the crumpled sheet of paper on his desk, tempted to go back to see if it was still there. He resisted, though resistance intensified curiosity, while Rosemary punished him with her silence. As soon as they had met, he had told her that they had been gossiped about, that they would have to be more circumspect in the future—Christopher’s vision of his behavior fretting him. She had accepted it without complaint, amused (she told him) at the ingenuousness of his saying it. But then, brooding over it, she had turned sour. “You don’t want to be responsible for what you do,” she had said.

  He had said he was tired of being criticized by her.

  Sitting across from him in her aunt’s living room, Rosemary announced—Curt absorbed with the notion of returning to his office—that she wanted to see him at night sometimes.

  He said he couldn’t without making things too difficult for himself.

  “What you’re really saying is that you don’t want to.”

  He admitted, wanting to end things, that there was some truth in her assumption, though he thought it tactless of her to mention it.

  She threw a book at him, hitting him in the knee. Though recent with them, he felt the fight as an old one in his life. Some dream terror he had long ago set aside. In that he had been through it before, painful as it was, it was comforting. He was a man who had from the beginning hated conflict, but never knew how to avoid it. (A theory of his: Once you discovered the needs war satisfied, it was irresistible.) As he was anticipating her loss, imagining painlessly what it would mean to him, she came over, head bowed, said (whispering it) that she forgave him. When he leaned forward to kiss her, she slapped his face hard. He turned his head. A big girl, she threw her weight against him, knocking him on his back. “Defend yourself,” she said, butting him. “Coward. Teacher.” He threw her off. Furious, she returned. They wrestled briefly, ended up making love—Rosemary unrelentingly fierce—on the floor. The sound of her pleasure sung in his ears like a dirge, touching him to the heart. She burned through his detachment and he knew, as never before, what terror loss held for him. It was like a wound had opened in him that could only be healed by having her. And that each time after having her, each time, no matter how satisfying in itself, the wound would be larger. Whatever else he felt for her, the black appetite of his need seemed all. He made love to her again, dreaming his freedom in her death. He went off like a gun with a plugged barrel.

  As he was leaving she said she would try, if that’s what he wanted of her, to be circumspect, laughing at the word.

  It was his pattern, his fate—women began by admiring him and ended up (after disillusion) laughing at him.

  The next day, as though something from a long-forgotten past, he discovered the paper ball Christopher had left for him, discovered it on the floor next to his chair, scrunched flat as if trampled on. Perhaps in coming in he had walked over it himself. It was a drawing, though not what he expected. A sketch of a man in a soldier uniform—the details remarkable—with a dove leaping it seemed from the man’s mouth. The dove was holding in its beak a branch which on closer inspection turned out to be a rifle. The soldier, his uniform more Civil War than modern, was standing over a body, sketchily drawn, of a woman—in her hair a flower with human face staring forlornly like a lost child. He studied the dust-stained sketch, trying to determine what message it held for him. From one of the soldier’s pockets a book protruded, God’s Word printed almost microscopically on it. There were clouds in the sky and a satanically grinning sun.

  Whatever its point, the drawing pleased him aesthetically and he took it home with the idea perhaps, if he could get the creases out, of mounting it for framing. He hadn’t intended to show it to Carolyn, who had (she once told him) perfect taste, but she found it in his briefcase, foraging, she said, for something to read.

  “Who did it?” was her first question.

  “What do you think of it?”

  “It’s not art,” she said, disdainful of his question, “if that’s what you think. Who did it?”

  Angry at her snobbery, he tried to get the picture back and succeeded only in claiming half, groaning in rage at his failure.

  “Are you out of your mind? If you had asked for it, Curt, I would have given it to you.” Taking a roll of Scotch tape from the top drawer of the secretary, mending the drawing while Curt, feeling useless, looked on.

  “It’s a good likeness,” she said in a conciliatory tone, “though frightening.”

  He was thinking, still angry, of twisting her arm but, recalling that he was a pacifist, restrained his rage. “A good likeness of whom?” Her remark struck him as idiotic.

  “Isn’t it supposed to be you?” She looked from the drawing to h
er husband to the drawing again. “Without being literal, it does capture something about you.”

  “It doesn’t look anything like me.” He took the drawing back and, without even glancing at it, returned it to his case.

  “It does, Curt. It does.”

  “You horror,” he muttered, and went to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. His reflection surprised him—an acquaintance though no one he knew well, sadder and older than he remembered. A face he had seen recently in a drawing of a soldier, dove coming out of mouth, in Civil War uniform. How could he not have known who it was?

  Committed to some notion of himself as an honorable man, he went back to the living room and apologized to Carolyn, who, though she didn’t laugh at him, looked as if she wanted to. As a further gesture—she had asked, hadn’t she?—he told her that the drawing was the work of his tutorial student, the one who had written the remarkable paper. Though she seemed no longer interested, he went on, telling her about him, all that he had not mentioned in his fear of being mocked during the past few weeks. Carolyn listened politely, restraining a natural skepticism, but when the rhetoric got more extravagant than she could bear, interrupted. “Don’t you see that he’s making fun of you in that drawing?”

  “I see that,” he said, furious, “but it’s also affectionate.”

  “It’s about as affectionate as poison gas,” she said. “About as loving as a knife in the back.”

  “You project your own malice,” he said, and waited, his guard up, for a return punch. Her silence, a new weapon in her arsenal, hit him where he was unprotected, left him feeling lonely, in the wrong. Wronged. He thought of asking Christopher about the drawing—what he intended by it—but was afraid the question might frighten him away.

  As the war in Asia got worse—a new record each week of deaths on both sides, bombs dropped, missions flown, villages destroyed—Curt began writing daily letters of protest to the President. The war, the violence of it, obsessed him. He felt responsible for its enlarging, for its increased savagery, as if it had some arterial connection to his own transgressions. In his classes, in his sessions with Christopher, he talked of almost nothing but the war, saw almost everything in terms of it. “Meaningless violence,” he told Christopher, “out of the dead prick of our national boredom.” The boy shrugged, looked bored, said even if it were true, there was nothing they could do about it. Curt argued against defeatism, said there was no hope unless one committed oneself to fighting for what one believed. “Isn’t that what the President is doing?” the boy asked disingenuously. Curt explained again (and not for the second time, either) that the President, having got stuck in the war through dishonorable advice, had to rationalize its horrors with specious ideology, justify the unjustifiable, to live with himself. “And you have to protest to live with yourself,” the boy said. Curt sighed, said he couldn’t live with himself until the war was over.

  At Curt’s urging, Christopher attended a few anti-war marches, though he seemed more interested in the anti-antiwar protesters shouting obscenities at the marchers from the sidelines—a crew of eyeless malcontents who followed them wherever they went, red-necked with rage, looking for a fight.

  Curt noticed him talking to one of them during a rally and asked him later what it had been about. “Nothing. We were just talking.”

  “What could you possibly find to talk to him about?”

  “If you’re on the side of peace,” the boy said angrily, “don’t you have to include him, too?”

  Curt thought about it, for a moment accepted the boy’s rebuke. “If that fellow you were talking to had his way,” Curt said, “he’d kill us both.”

  “It’s people like you who have made all the wars, not him. He’s never had his way. He’s only doing what he feels is right.”

  “Don’t make a virtue of stupidity.”

  And just as the argument was about to get hot—it was standard procedure between them—the boy withdrew, acknowledged with straight-faced irony, like defaulting a match he had won, that his teacher was in the right. At such times Curt wanted to shake him into admitting what he was doing, but didn’t. Didn’t dare.

  He was ten minutes late for their next meeting.

  “Our appointment was for three,” Parks said, in a black mood. He had been reading the Times while waiting for him. “Not three-five or three-ten. You’ve missed this week’s class as far as I’m concerned. I’ll see you next week.”

  He got to his feet, his face burning.

  “Do you want to say something?”

  “No.”

  “And I don’t want to be followed anymore. To follow a man is to violate him. Do you understand that?”

  As if carrying something on his back, the boy backed slowly to the door, though he seemed, hunched forward, to be coming toward him. “No one’s following you. No one wants to follow you. There’s nothing to follow. Who are you …?” He turned sharply—almost a military gesture—and went out.

  How helpless he felt, how responsible! As if there were a direct correlation, each time he got pleasure in Rosemary’s bed, the war got worse. It was madness to believe it. Yet when he spent a day away from her—abstinence becoming harder and harder—the war seemed that day to abate, peace talks were rumored, hints of secret negotiation, which would die the natural death of denial the next day. Worse than the madness of his fantasy was that even if he thought it would end the war, he wouldn’t have given her up. Sex before peace—his shame. Need taking priority over principle. Love, his need. Love? He didn’t kid himself. His desire for her in recent weeks a fever, an obsession. As the war got worse, he saw himself in the maddest of his dreams screwing the world—each thrust a detonation—to cataclysm.

  On the whole she treated him kindly, acted as if the balance of power had not shifted radically to her advantage, for which he was grateful and frightened. He moved in constant fear that she would give him up. And so in anticipation he imagined, exiling himself in a kind of monastery of the spirit, what it would be not to have her anymore. Sometimes it seemed possible, but it was like conceiving a future of nothing. Paralysis. Impotence. Death. Was fucking all? It was madness. His hope was that it would pass, that he would wake up one day well again, the fever gone, his own man. He envied himself the dull ease he had lost. The good old days of mild dissatisfaction. At least he had behaved like a gentleman then. He hated what he had become.

  Why did she put up with him? She was a nice girl—even in his fever for her he saw that—gentle, affectionate, undemanding, what his father would consider a lady. Lady Rosemary. His fucking lady. Ah, how he loved to mount her, plow the fields of hell with her—to the sun and back, the dark lady of his light. His hell, his heaven. He fought his war on her field of battle. It was, in his father’s words, the awful joy of combat. Why did she put up with him? This monster, who, in search of some enemy he had never seen, devastated her dark fields, blasting what he could to get at what he couldn’t. Demanding affection in return for his violence, jealous of his shadow, of hers, of her time away from him. Mournful, charmless, brutal, lustful, brandishing his wounds like armor. What an unlovable horror he was. He suspected, disturbed by the perception, that it was fear (not love) that kept her from breaking with him.

  One day in bed, still occupying her, though already come and gone, he asked her what she wanted of him.

  “That’s not a very flattering question,” she said.

  He didn’t know how else to ask. “What I’m asking,” he said, “is if you love me.” The question, he knew (a woman’s question), courted loss.

  He felt the chill of her silence, remembered as a child falling into an ice-covered pond, the surface, which seemed sufficient to his weight, cracking suddenly beneath him.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There are times …”

  They came apart. “Then why do you continue to see me?”

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  She was silent again, her
face against his. He put his hand between her legs.

  “You treat me as if I were a toy,” she said. “You wouldn’t if you really loved me.”

  He groaned. “If you think that, why do you see me?”

  “I think you think you love me. I like it that you want me—don’t you know?—that I make you happy.”

  “And I don’t make you happy?”

  “Sometimes.” She kissed his ear.

  It was time for him to leave, though his prick—no respecter of schedules—had its own idea. He tore into her and in six short thrusts (like shooting tin cans off a fence) dispatched the burden of his pleasure.

  “I love you,” he grumbled, leaving. All his nerves exposed. He bought a paper to see what new turn the war had taken in his absence. What new atrocity he had set in motion. Nothing new. On the subway he remembered her face, the hurt in her eyes as he left, and it struck him that this time what he feared most had come to pass—he had lost her. The sensation was like the hemorrhaging of an old wound. He put his head in his arms and, dry-eyed, dreamed the city in flames. His tears fell on it and the flames shot upward, burning out his eyes.

  SIX

  SOMETHING WARNS ME, some electronic voice in my head. Not to go out. Not to leave Parks’ house. If you can get by today, the voice says, tomorrow will be possible.

  Parks and wife don’t look at each other. His eyes inside, hers on hands and feet. They talk through me as if I were a door between them. Parks moving around, looking for a place to be. We are all in his way. The tension in the air like bees.

  He leaves after breakfast. Before he goes, he asks what my plans are. (He wants me to go with him.) I have no plans.

  The television beauty whispers to me as I shave. Take it off, take it off, take it all off. I take it off for her, her mouth in the mirror leering obscenely. Your face is your past, she says. She keeps asking me things. What am I supposed to do? She wants me to do something to her.