Flight of Brothers

by Jonathan Baumbach

  Tarkovsky has been Berger’s mentor, but Berger, insofar as he reckons his own accomplishment, has not only surpassed his former master but has become unwittingly privy to the other’s hitherto concealed weaknesses.

  Josh, on the other hand, is still emerging as a writer and concedes a certain minor indebtedness to Tarkovsky’s early work. In the unacknowledged war between Berger and Tarkovsky, Josh is a relative neutral with one foot perhaps in the Tarkovsky camp. Lisa Strata is a bemused observer. Genevieve wants Josh, imagines she is in love with him, but remains, enclosed by silence, protected by vagueness, not quite explicable even to herself.

  If there is no story to this point, there is at least a dynamic to its embryonic possibility.

  After dinner, Tarkovsky will address himself to Josh away from the others.

  “Are you working on a novel?” he asks him. “Isn’t that what you told me over the phone?”

  “I am,” he says. “I’m hoping to have my rewrite finished before I leave Dadda.”

  “Send me a copy when you’re ready to show it,” Tarkovsky says.

  Josh merely nods, too pleased by Tarkovsky’s unexpected offer to find the appropriate language with which to thank him. “I’ll do that,” he says.

  Later Josh will mention Tarkovsky’s offer to Genevieve, underplaying his elation in a way that gives it away twice.

  “Congratulations,” she says. “He’s showing you that he’s a better person than Harry Berger.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s one reason,” she says, “but probably not the main one. It’s obvious that he respects you a lot.”

  “He said that my review was the best thing ever written about one of his books.”

  “You don’t need his praise,” she says. “You’re too good for that.”

  Lisa Strata helps clear the table overriding Anna’s awkward protest that such a gesture is unnecessary. Berger wanders into the living room, checking out Tarkovsky’s library. He notes that two of his five books on these carefully alphabetized shelves are a notable absence.

  And then, following an after-dinner drink, which Josh alone foregoes, it is time to return to Dadda. Handshakes are exchanged. This is not a period in which men embrace in public. Anna remains in the kitchen, calls out a goodbye when it becomes clear that Izzy’s guests are clearing out.

  And still there is no story of consequence beyond what I think of as the unacknowledged unspoken. Our story, if it ever claims itself, is embedded in unimagined, perhaps unimaginable possibility. Of course there is the trip back to be dramatized with Lisa and Harry in the back seat, amusing themselves at the Tarkovskys’ expense. Josh, on the other hand, is an unwitting eavesdropper, ashamed of his unwillingness to defend the older writer from his cruel satirists. There is some compensation, however, in his situation. He can imagine writing the story of this dinner at the Tarkovskys’ one day to Berger’s disadvantage and there’s the more immediate compensation of Genevieve’s sly hand in his lap as he drives. They will have great sex that night, perhaps their best ever, fueled by the fallout of the visit. Genevieve will leave the next day to attend graduate school in California and they will not see each other again for almost a year.

  Berger and Lisa Strata will sleep this night in their own rooms, which one assumes, has been Berger’s decision, wanting to keep something in the tank for the final gestures of his book, which is stored each night in a refrigerator to protect it from nuclear attack or local conflagration. We are still in the era of typewriters and longhand and it is not easy to protect ones creations from the unforeseen.

  Lisa will reward this slight by doing a painting of Berger from memory, showing the back of his head neatly coiffed, doubled in surreal surprise by a mirror image of the same. The painting entitled “The Other Side of Fame” will be a critic pleaser in her next one-woman show, singled out for praise in virtually every review.

  Tarkovsky will write a generous blurb for Joshua’s first novel which will appear in large type on the back cover and, had there not been a newspaper strike at the novel’s appearance, would have played a significant part in the book’s reception.

  In short order, Berger will publish the novel he had completed at Dadda and he will win a Pullitzer for it, his first of several.

  None of these consequences is a particular surprise to the attentive observer and none is a direct consequence of the trip from Dadda to Copington to visit IM Tarkovsky.

  Something seems to have been left out, something important that has slipped our attention.

  Eighteen months after the Tarkovsky visit, Joshua will separate from his wife and move into a furnished room not far from Genevieve’s loft apartment in what will later be known as the East Village. A year or so down the road, a time punctuated by a series of agreements never to see the other again, Joshua and Genevieve will move in together, marry, have children, separate, divorce.

  Let’s backtrack a moment, not all the way back to that summer at Dadda, which is at the center of our narrative, but back to a period when Joshua and Genevieve have temporarily broken up.

  During that period, Berger and Genevieve run into each other circumstantially and Berger bestirs himself to be charming, remembering how smart and sexy Genevieve seemed that evening at Tarkovsky’s. As they are going in the same direction, they walk together for a while at Berger’s urging. When they are about to separate, he invites her to come up to his place for a glass of wine. Genevieve declines—she has an appointment with her therapist in twenty minutes—but promises she will come by another time. Berger takes her number, but never gets around to calling. Two weeks later, they run into each other again at the very moment Berger is wondering where he had deposited the slip of paper with Genevieve’s number on it.

  This second meeting, in which the fingerprints of fate seemed notable, offers the opportunity for each to make good on failed promises. “I’m just around the corner,” Berger says. “Why don’t you come up for a glass of wine?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, which is not so much a rejection of his offer as an opportunity for Berger to make his petition easier for her to accept.

  “What don’t you know?” he asks. “What makes this such a hard decision for you?”

  “One glass of wine and that’s it,” she says. “Okay?”

  “Absolutely,” he says. “I never urge anyone to do anything she doesn’t want to do. I think we understand each other.”

  And so they walk together (and apart) to Berger’s brownstone duplex apartment, which is actually three blocks away from where they had been. They chat as they walk. He seems interested in her story, which in her telling is never quite the same story twice.

  What is Genevieve thinking? one wonders. She can always say no, she might be telling herself, if it comes to whatever it’s likely to come to. If she doesn’t say no—perhaps he won’t even make a pass—she can always tell Josh she had, assuming that she and Josh get together again, which remains an angry hope and an inescapable expectation. More to the point, she gets off on living dangerously, she always has, so however it plays out, the frisson of her visit is likely worth whatever the ultimate price of admission.

  The apartment is unexpectedly incomplete, bookcases partially filled, unpacked boxes on the floor, paintings guarding their potential space on the wall. This is mostly true of the living room where they sit, facing each other across an oversized slate coffee table, drinking expensive French wine.

  “How are things going with you and Josh?” he asks her.

  “Okay,” she says. “Why do you want to know? I wouldn’t think that would interest you.”

  “Everything about you interests me,” he says.

  “You’re just making conversation,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says. “Do you like the wine?”

  She knows or thinks she knows or doesn’t know she knows that if she wants to be in charge of herself, a second glass of wine is a mistake. She knows that, doesn’t she? She has cautioned h
erself in advance not to have more than one glass of wine, though at the same time she wants to be open to the moment, to collaborate with the moment in making her decision.

  It is already too late. With a self-effacing laugh, she lets him fill up her glass for a second time.

  She also knows, or some part of her does, that if she sleeps with Berger, which is the obvious endgame of his determined kindness, that Josh would hold it against her virtually forever. That’s his problem of course and only marginally hers. And it is very good wine to which the label attests and her taste buds insistently acknowledge.

  And still she thinks, not now, not this time, or why not? She sips carefully, savoring the wine.

  “How is it you’re not living with anyone?” she hears herself ask him.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “That’s just the way it is at the moment.”

  “Is it?”

  “It is,” he says. “Do you think I should be living with someone?”

  Another laugh escapes her, occupies the space between them. She wonders at the source of the laugh and considers, against her saner judgment, turning her head. “It’s none of my business,” she says. “With someone like you, it probably makes no difference anyway. Whoever you’re with, you’re always alone.”

  Berger says nothing, looks away, looks back, looks like someone on the deck of a ship with the wind blowing in his face. “That’s a cruel thing to say,” he says. “It’s also very shrewd. Possibly even true.”

  She feels flattered by his compliment, though it is not an unmixed pleasure, and she chokes back a thank you, which is all too readily and embarrassingly available.

  And when is he going to make his move? she wonders. Berger may well be wondering the same thing himself.

  “I’d better go,” she says.

  “Must you run off? Finish your glass first.”

  “It’s wonderful wine,” she says. “Are you trying to get me drunk?”

  “Do I get any points for making that admission?”

  Another laugh gets the better of her private decision not to be amused. “I don’t give out points,” she says. “If I did…”

  He stands up. “Did you have a coat?” he asks. “I really have to get back to work. We’ll do this again soon, I hope.”

  “My coat, it’s lying on one of your boxes,” she says, unsure of what’s going on.

  He holds her coat for her. She gets up , feeling a bit unstable, to accept his gesture, wondering if he is protecting her from herself. Nevertheless she feels, as she works her arms into her coat, that she’s the one that’s being deprived. At the door, where she initiates a kiss, she notices that her wine glass, her second glass of wine, perhaps her third, is approximately half full.

  She will go to bed with Berger on her next and last visit to his apartment. And ten years later, she will confess it to Josh, who is her husband now, during a stay in the south of France.

  The confession is the beginning of the end of her marriage, which will last another two and a half years, coming apart as if it were a slow motion replay of its burgeoning failure. She knows Josh will never forgive her for sleeping with Berger and she will grow to hate him for being so unforgiving.

  This is the forgotten story or at the very least its stand-in. For the moment, if you can imagine it, we are back in Josh’s five year old Volvo, his inamorata Genevieve in the passenger seat, Lisa Strata and Harry Berger in the back, en route to Copington Vermont to have dinner at the home of the celebrated writer, I.M. Tarkovsky. We are frozen forever in a moment of unbridled expectation.

  TRAVELS WITH WIZARD

  When Spring finally made its entrance on the scene, the hopelessness the biographer Leo Dimoff felt during the long excoriating winter persisted and so, sensing the need—at 59, at the cusp of 60—for radical change in his life, he decided to get himself a dog.

  Why a dog?

  For one thing, living alone after a lifelong failed apprenticeship in the relationship trade, Leo felt deprived, wanted companionship though without the attendant complications. The women in his life—former wives and lovers—had, so his story went, burdened him with unanswerable demands.

  “You want a dog because they don’t talk back,” Sarah, his most recent former live-in companion, told him over dinner at Shiro, the very Japanese restaurant that had hosted their break-up. They had lived together for almost a year in the not so distant unremembered past and had remained contentious friends.

  “Dog owners are never called chauvinists,” he said. “And certainly not by their dogs.”

  “I love dogs,” she said. “though I’ve never had one. What kind of dog are you thinking of, Leo?”

  “I’ve been doing the research,” he said. “I may have read everything about choosing a dog the Book Loft had in stock. I may in fact have acquired more information than I know what to do with. What I’m in the market for is a medium-sized, aesthetically pleasing, low maintenance puppy who is affectionate, intelligent and, most importantly, faithful. What do you think? I’d be grateful for suggestions.”

  “Whew!” she said, turning her face away to issue a brief secretive smile. “Well, I know it’s not for everyone but I’ve always been partial to the Russell Terrier.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a kind of circus dog, isn’t it? One of my dog texts—it may be Puppies for Dummies—says that Russells tend to be high strung.”

  “Too high strung, huh? You want a placid, doting, drooling dog, is that it? Mixed breeds are thought to be less high strung than full breeds. Leo, you could go to a shelter and pick out a puppy.”

  “I could,” he said. “Would you accompany me?”

  “I might,” she said. “And then again I might not.”

  That the heart has its reasons and usually poor ones represented a good half of Leo’s shaky acquired wisdom. On the other hand, as a biographer, he was generally esteemed for an empathic understanding of the wisdom and frailty of others.

  Nevertheless, in careless love, he had come home one day with an odd-looking, long legged, long-haired, big-nosed tan and white puppy that had, said the shelter report, some terrier, some poodle and a soupcon of shepherd in its otherwise indecipherable makeup. The woman running the shelter, who reminded him of a former grade school teacher whose name he sometimes remembered, said he could bring the puppy back in a week if it didn’t work out. “It’ll work out,” he told her.

  Leo stayed awake much of their first night together, concerned that the silent puppy, tentatively named Wizard after the subject of his latest biography, might suffocate without him there to monitor its sleep. The woman who ran the shelter had warned him that the infant dog, feeling displaced in new surroundings, might cry his first night away from the only home he knew. That Wizard’s behavior defeated expectations gave the biographer, a worrier in the best of seasons, cause for concern. The puppy started the night in an overwhelmingly large crate at the foot of Leo’s bed. In the morning, when Leo opened his eyes, unaware of having slept, his charge was on the pillow next to him. In fact it was Wizard’s yelp, or perhaps it was only a high-pitched bark, that woke Leo from a dream in which the small dog he was caring for grew unacceptably large overnight.

  At Sarah’s advice and against his own predilections, Leo took Wizard to a local trainer, a friend of Sarah’s also named Sara (without the h) for obedience lessons.

  Rosy-cheeked, slightly pudgy, the trainer, the other Sara, seemed barely out of her teens. When Leo asked her age, she let him know with a shin-kicking glance that she considered his question impertinent. “I’m older than I look,” she said. “And I’m excellent at my job.”

  Leo, only slightly cowed, resisted the impulse to apologize.

  In the following moment, they had their second misunderstanding. It came when she asked him the puppy’s name. “Wizard,” he said, not yet comfortable with the choice.

  “Whizzer?” she said.

  “Wizard,” he muttered.

  “I understand,” she said.
“Whizzer.”

  From what he could tell, Wizard seemed to be failing his first lesson, which embarrassed the biographer, who offered excuses for his charge’s slow-wittedness. “He tends to be shy with strangers,” Leo said.

  “Oh he’s doing just fine,” Sara said. “And since we’re already friends, aren’t we, Whizzer? (chucking the puppy under the chin), we can no longer be considered strangers. I think we need to do this twice a week and you need to practice commands with him in the morning before breakfast and at night before he goes to sleep. If it will make it easier for you, I’ll come to your house next time.”

  Leo reluctantly accepted her offer, having no reason—none he could find words for—not to.

  For the next several weeks, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Sara appeared at his door promptly at 4:30 for Wizard’s lesson. At their first session, Leo offered the trainer a cup of coffee, which she declined. Thereafter he made her herbal tea, specifically the ginseng-chai combination she favored, and more often than not the trainer stayed beyond the forty minutes set aside for the actual lesson. Though he was at least twenty years her senior, Leo sometimes imagined that her extended stays had something to do with him.

  “Whizzer’s very bright,” she told Leo, who, although pleased by the compliment, remained skeptical. Not only was the dog not toilet-trained after three weeks in his care, but he tended to leave his shit just off the edge of the paper—usually The New York Times sports page—laid out to take its measure.

  And then one day when least expected, Wizard stopped doing his “business”—that repellent dog-manual euphemism—in inappropriate places. Not one to believe in undeserved good fortune, Leo obsessively searched the three rooms available to his charge, sometimes on hands and knees, before acknowledging that the puppy, whose name he had been thinking of changing, was not as dim as previously suspected.

  Whenever Sara arrived—at times her knock at the door would be sufficient—Wizard would do a pirouette in ecstatic expectation, which made Leo jealous despite the murmurs of his better judgment. It was important of course that the puppy be fond of his trainer. Still, the 360-degree turn, sometimes restated, seemed a little much. Although Leo fed the puppy, doted on him, walked him in good and bad weather, early and late, he sometimes imagined that Wizard, in his faithless heart, actually preferred Sara.