The Return of Service

by Baumbach, Jonathan;

  “Isn’t that true of everyone?” I say.

  “It is even more true of K than of everyone,” she says. “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to show that man that the world is not empty of genuine trust and affection.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  She is, before I can ask the question a second time, gone. The door closes behind her. “What about me?” I ask, calling her on the phone. “You’re not so bad,” she says. In her absence I revise my life. I take in cats off the street. My hair grows long in the back and on the sides, recedes gracefully in front. I no longer wear a tie except when I leave the house.

  She calls me to say that K’s white hair has turned black.

  In the mirror, the face of experience opposes me with eyes that burn with unannounced losses. Everything I have ever been separated from, including a penknife I lost when I was nine, hides in those bleak hollows. In my eyes, in their reflection in the mirror, I can see the book on time that used to keep me company. It is the same book, though apparently also somewhat different, an earlier or later edition. Every page is the page I had been reading last. And on that same page there is the same sentence repeated over and over until abridged at the bottom by the limits of the page. The time of the man who waits will come. The time of the man who waits will

  I lie down on the rug to wait for something new to be written.

  My life has run out of words.

  3

  I have just killed my first woman. It has been that kind of day. Slow. Slower than the New York subway system on a slow hot summer Sunday morning.

  My first shots took out the red-rimmed headlights of a fiftyish alcoholic, a former winner of the Prix de Rome. I was testing my sights when he staggered into range as if looking for someone to dispel the myth of his immortality.

  When I woke up this morning I thought I would have a breakfast of cereal and fresh fruit and just oil my gun. The fruit has gone rotten overnight. That shouldn’t have happened.

  On the Today show, Barbara Walters was interviewing the first dog ever to publish a cookbook. “That dog earns more money than you,” my wife said. It was after that that I thought I’d look out the window to see if there was anything to shoot.

  In the afternoon I get a call from someone whose voice I’d never heard before. “You the guy been shooting things out the window?”

  “Wrong number,” I say quickly. “I happen to be the dog that wrote the best selling cookbook you may have seen interviewed on the Today show this morning by Barbara Walters.”

  “‘Look, whoever you are, I’m not the kind of guy wants to get you in trouble,” my caller says. “So I would appreciate it if you would do me this favor. In about twenty, twenty-five minutes my old lady is coming over for a visit. She’s got short fluffed-up white hair and is a bit stout. She’ll be going into the building almost directly across from your window, the number is 167, and you’ll be doing me a favor if you pop her one as she goes in.”

  “I can’t make any promises,” I say. “I’m a spontaneous, indiscriminate, free-fire assassin. If she strikes my fancy, fine. Otherwise, I just couldn’t squeeze it off.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says in a bullying voice dimly familiar, “because if she doesn’t get popped, you may have a policeman ringing your bell the next thing you know.” He hangs up before I can ask him his name.

  Some moments after his last words a woman much like the woman he describes bobs like an apple into my sights. It is a question of retaining my independence. Although I could easily shoot her—she has, I might say, a certain flair as a target—I let her go by.

  She has hardly gone when there is a heavy knock at the door.

  My wife answers. I listen from under the bed behind a locked door.

  “We have a complaint that someone is shooting people from a window in this apartment.”

  “I’ve been in the kitchen all morning,” she says, “and I can’t hear a thing when the dishwasher is running.”

  “Is there someone else in this living unit, a husband or a loved one?”

  I couldn’t hear her answer but apparently it was no because I heard the door close a few minutes after.

  I dry off my palms, which are reddish (perhaps from the stain on the gun barrel), before returning to my station. Later, my wife comes in and pleads with me to give up the sniping business.

  It is a calling, I tell her, which is, for someone who has never had one, something hard to understand.

  She shakes my shoulder, making me miss a shot I had particularly relished. “You could give it up if you really wanted to, Jack. Everything we do is a matter of choice, and you know it.”

  I offer a compromise: one more killing and then I give it up.

  One last one and I will never look through the sights of a gun again.

  “All right,” she says, a grudging compliance, “but you have to let me pick out the last one for you. Do you agree?”

  This is the first show of interest she has ever given my line of work. We spend the morning and afternoon looking out the window together, waiting for her to make her choice.

  “How about that one?” I suggest from time to time.

  “Are you kidding?” she would say. “You can’t possibly be interested in that one. That one’s all wrong for you.”

  The light is gone so we quit for the day, have a dinner of our usual leftovers and go to bed. (Did I remember to clean the gun?)

  The next day. Before I can finish my breakfast of stewed prunes, poached eggs on toast, and tea, she is at the window with my gun fixed into her shoulder, studying the cityscape like a born assassin. “I think I see someone for you,” she says, but when I get there whoever she has in mind for me has evaporated.

  Later, the morning wasted in inaction—nothing exactly right—she asks, “Would you mind if I took a shot?”

  “At what?”

  “Oh, at anything. I just want to see what it feels like.”

  “Do you know how to aim?”

  “You look through this thing, don’t you?”

  “You aim at something in the sights then squeeze the trigger exceedingly gently so as to keep the gun from jumping as it fires.”

  She nods then pulls the trigger off in a blind rush, shooting the horse out from under a mounted policeman. “That was easy.”

  She brings the gun, which had squirmed like a baby at the release of the shot, back into firing position. I try to get it away from her but she holds tight.

  “One more,” she says. “What’s fair for you is fair for me.”

  I say no, and ask once again in a reasonable tone for the return of the gun. “Killing is addictive,” I remind her.

  My empty hand out is ignored. She fires three leaping shots in ripe succession, pinning the policeman to the flanks of his horse.

  I go out and come back, sit around reading old newspapers, waiting for her to give it up. There are none of the anticipated opportunities. The gun visits the bathroom when she does. She wears it in a sling over her shoulder at the dinner table.

  My opportunity will come, I think, when she goes to sleep, which is something she’s done every night for as long as I’ve known her.

  At two minutes after midnight she is still at the window with my gun.

  What I do, which is hard to do when you are genuinely tired, is pretend to go to sleep. She lies down next to me and without warning screams, “The police are coming for you,” in my ear.

  I groan in my pretended sleep. “Are you asleep?” she asks again and again. When I say, “Yes,” she rolls over on her side, sighing like a cat.

  There’s no need to detail here the process by which I cut away the rifle strap from around her shoulder while she sleeps and slide the gun out from under her nightgown without waking her. It is done. Although I am fond of the gun—it is one of the objects of my affection—I am resolved for my wife’s sake to dispose of it before she wakes. I think of reducing it to its parts and burying it in a cemetery or dro
pping it with weights around the barrel into a river.

  She is awake and calling my name before I am out the door.

  Before I can reason with her we are in a tug of war. The gun goes off. She falls in a fragment of blood like the missing section of a jigsaw puzzle.

  It is not my idea of married life.

  4

  I am walking with the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

  “What are your chances?” I ask him.

  We are walking down the steps of the Pentagon. “They could be better and they could be worse: He has, it is characteristic of him, the saddest smile. “If pushed to the wall, I would say two to one.”

  The answer makes no sense to me, though I let it pass. I tell him that according to my sense of the national vibration, he’s going to win the election, time on his side. The election, insofar as I can remember, is two or three months away. It was or is. Such facts of time are unreliable.

  He talks about loyalty and betrayal, asks if I would support a man who had no chance to win. If he was the best man, I say.

  I reach for a handkerchief. A Secret Service man grabs my hand before I can get it inside my pants pocket, removes a gun I didn’t know I had.

  “It is easier to trust people,” says the candidate with painful regret, “when you make sure they have nothing about them to distrust.”

  How can I explain the secret possession of a weapon? “I use it for hunting,” I say. “That is, I used to hunt. It is now just a token of former days.” I offer half a dozen self-conflicting explanations.

  “You don’t want me to win, do you?” he says sternly, his face closed to interpretation. “What you want is to commit yourself to an occasion for defeat.”

  I insist that it is not true, offer to do whatever I can to help bring about his election.

  “How far would you go?”

  “Try me.”

  “There is something we desperately need at this time in our history, but to be frank I doubt that you’re the right man for the job.” Our latrines are beyond the pale.

  I defend his behavior to myself as an aspect of his distraction.

  I volunteer my services. “With all due respect. sir,” I say, “I believe I, can write better speeches than the ones you’ve been using.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe so.” He walks very quickly, irritated with me or perhaps with himself, a pigeon flying out of his back pocket. He is not the man I imagined he was, if still the best of two practical alternatives.

  Dreaming of time is dreaming of being too late.

  The next time we meet he does not remember our earlier interview. I joke with him. “Has anyone cleaned out the latrines for you yet?”

  He clamps thumb and forefinger to his nose. “My friend, you wouldn’t believe how high the shit has risen. We’ve had to move our headquarters on three separate occasions just to escape it.”

  “The last time we talked I asked you what you thought your chances were and you gave me a concise and somewhat cryptic answer. I’d like to ask you what your view of your chances is today.”

  “Same view. Same chances.”

  He has the look of a man who has spent all hope, his face even more saintlike than I remember it under the strain of lost cause. I ask for an elucidation of his remarks.

  He shakes his head in a convulsive way a number of times.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Jack, I’m late for a hell-raising dinner. I guess we can go along together and talk if that suits your plans.”

  I share a taxi with him to the Grand Hotel. As a campaign economy, I let sit on my lap one of his entourage, his interpreter of questions and labor problems, a skinny dark-haired woman named Winnie. The cab has its radio on, making it difficult to hear ourselves talk.

  “Sometimes the measure of, a man,” says the candidate, “is how he bears his losses.”

  I remind him that it was he who had accused me of defeatism in the early days: The interpreter on my lap says, “Shhh.” There is something on the news she wants to hear. The static as we rush through traffic is almost impenetrable, “We’re winning,” she says, “according to the early returns.”

  “Is she kidding?” I ask him. “The voting hasn’t taken place yet, has it?”

  “Winnie has a way of cutting through all the gunk,” he says, “to the heart of the message.”

  “You’ve taken Idaho and the Philippines,” she reports.

  “I suppose,” the candidate says in his weary drawl, “I’ll have to give them back.”

  “What will you do, senator, if you win?”

  “First of all, I’ll give up prophecy.”

  Everyone in the cab laughs.

  “Can this man walk on water?” asks the cabdriver. “The traffic don’t budge, it don’t budge. So where are we?”

  “Just take your time,” says the candidate. “They can’t do anything until we get there.”

  “What’s the latest?” I ask the interpreter.

  “They’ve stopped voting,” she says. “Everything’s at a standstill.”

  The candidate makes a personal appeal to his followers not to panic. His eyes close out of weariness. A crack appears in his forehead above the right eye. He says in a whisper, “Now you see from the inside, Jack, what this campaign’s been like.”

  “There have been,” someone says, “thirty -nine attempts on his probity.”

  For no reason, for nothing I’ve done, the interpreter turns around and kisses me. “Have you ever thought of politics?” she asks. The candidate’s crowd of supporters clap politely and call for a speech.

  “I’m getting old,” says the candidate. “Someone’s going to have to take my place.”

  When no one is looking, unable to fulfill their expectations of me, I sneak out the door of the cab and, unsure of the direction, run for my life.

  An angry crowd, a mob it would seem, appears out of a blind alley to block my way. “Surprise,” they shout in one voice. “Many happy returns.”

  The Curse

  The awful hair didn’t foliate all at once or at the cosmic theater of a full moon (as prescribed by legend), but gradually, irresistibly, over a period of seven years.

  “I didn’t want to say anything,” my wife said to me one morning, “because I know how sensitive you are about your appearance, but the fact is you’re getting repellently hairy.”

  “I’ve been thinking of growing a rabbinical beard,” I said.

  The fangs were harder to explain. Fortunately, for the academic appointment in Anthropology I held at a prestigious midwestern university, the lupine incisors only occasionally showed themselves during daylight hours.

  It is my intention in this paper to draw sharp distinctions between superstition and fact, between latent content and manifest reality.

  I am cursed.

  A woman at a cocktail party, a poet (so she said), unread, perhaps unpublished, put a curse on me.

  What did I do or say that provoked her? Was it that I asked her to marry me or that I didn’t? I can’t remember. We argued about something that seemed trivial at the time. She flew into a rage. “There’s a curse on you now,” she said with a wicked grin.

  Perhaps my father, who was said to have spells, suffered from the same affliction.

  On certain nights, unable to control his vile need, the wolf wanders the shadowy streets in obsessive quest of strange women.

  From all available evidence, he likes them fat, with barely perceptible defects of character.

  What I do: I don’t know what it is—my wolf self a comparative stranger. The morning after one of his escapades I wake up in my own bed as from a nightmare too frightening to survive the light. There are mud stains on my boots. After breakfast I check the morning papers to see if anything has been reported for which I might be accountable. There is always something. Too much responsibility is like having none at all.

  I copy them down in a notebook, the violent crimes I might own and some others, though less likely, which st
rike dim chords of recognition, in the hope of coming to know my other self. In the past nine months, as of yesterday, I have collected the imprecise accounts of two hundred and seventy-nine savage crimes.

  My wife says, “Though I have tried, God knows, I can’t love a monster even if he is my own husband.”

  Today at the college, the chairman of my department asked me into his office for one of his mildly apologetic dressings down. He had no objections to beards as such, he wanted me to know, a neatly trimmed beard certainly doing no violation to the canons of academic propriety, but….didn’t I think it might not be the wisest thing, antagonizing others where antagonism might be avoided.

  I kept my hairy hands in my pockets while he spoke. The wolf going through a particularly dangerous phase.

  I woke without regret this morning, feeling if anything some relief as if during the night I had shed some burden. We are learning to live together, the wolf and I, have reached a sort of unspoken accommodation.

  At the college, a note in my mailbox from a G. Tress in the Classics Department. “When will I see you again?” it asks. The curious thing is I have no recollection of having seen Tress before.

  My therapist, Roper—this, my first visit in almost a year—asks if I’ve had any new incidents. I admit with sheep’s grin to a few. “If you didn’t dwell on it,” he says, disturbed at his failure with my case, “it would go away.” He has no faith in curses.

  A dreamless night. No sign of mud on my boots for the first time in seven days. Miss Tress (at lunch with her in the Faculty Club): though characteristically plump, is more attractive than the women the wolf ordinarily pursues. I apologize for my behavior at our last meeting, devious as a fox, in the hope of finding out what it was. She winks at me and laughs. What was it that she finds funny? I ask. “Nothing,” she says, blushing. She opens her blouse to show me a terrible scar between her breasts. I hold the menu in front of her to block the eyes of others.—How did that happen?—Your claws, she whispers. Don’t you remember?

  Her wound, the dizzying spectacle of it, makes my eyes water. “You are a sentimental beast,” she says. “Would I have showed it to you if it were not something of which I was proud?”