A Man to Conjure With

by Jonathan Baumbach

“I’ve been fine,” she said sadly. “I have good and bad weeks. This is a good week.”

  “You look fine,” he said.

  “You do too. You really do.”

  Patton glanced at his watch, a gold cuff link winking its secret eye; he smiled benignly.

  “Well…” Peter said.

  “I’ve been painting again,” Lois said. “I’d show you something, but it’s not very good. It’s just something to do. Like, it makes me happy.”

  There were lines in her face, signs of wear he hadn’t noticed before—the change in the light, his proximity exposing them. “I’d like to see your paintings,” he said.

  “They’re not very good.” She was being coy. “So what have you been doing? Tell me. You’ve been very evasive.”

  Clowning, he hung his head. “I’ve been bumming around mostly,” he said, as if they couldn’t tell, “still looking for something I want to do.” He laughed, though it came out like a moan.

  Patton was standing. “It’s time for us to go, I’m afraid,” he said. “We have tickets for the theater,” he explained to Peter.

  Lois glanced at Peter, shrugged, made a child’s sour face.

  “I have to go anyway,” Peter said, getting up, his legs cramped. “I have some work to do.”

  While Patton was getting the coats, Lois motioned Peter to the other side of the room. “Would you come to dinner tomorrow night?” she whispered to him. “Please. It would make me happy.”

  He nodded, his voice choked.

  “Sevenish,” she said.

  As they filed out of the apartment, Peter glanced at Patton; their eyes brushed momentarily. In the mild gray, Peter saw something darker: reptilian wisdom flickering blandly, cold as a winter wind. Were they adversaries already? It hardly mattered.

  A chilled silence hung over them as they waited in the street for an empty cab. Unwilling to separate, Peter hung on, dawdled, aware that he was an intruder. He was still there, looking on, as Patton maneuvered Lois into the back seat of a cab; he waved good-bye effusively to cover his pain, a mawkish uncle, as if anyone cared. They waved back behind their window, a blur of faces; the taxi splashed him as it bolted from the curb; when they were out of sight he walked to the subway, his feet cold. It rankled that neither had asked him if he wanted a lift.

  That night in his four-dollars-a-day hotel room, lying awake, the passing cars spattering bones of light on his wall, Peter reviewed the pleasures of his life—small ghosts. A family of nomads, they had all wandered in different directions. He hadn’t seen his father in years, hardly knew where he was—somewhere in the Southwest, he thought, retired, perhaps no longer alive. Six years before, he had visited the old man, prosperous, ageless, in an air-conditioned imitationadobe ranch house in Tucson, Arizona. For the two weeks Peter stayed with him they even managed not to fight, lived together with the curious tenderness of neighbors in an old-age home. Peter thought of staying—his father asked him to (the small charity of old age), but at last he decided to move on. There was nothing for him in Tucson, an artificial Eden with orange trees growing out of the sidewalk, a hot, dry tourists’ paradise where the dying came to settle for their health. Since then there had been one post card from his father, mailed from some suburb of Los Angeles, on which the old man wrote of getting married “before he died.” A woman with three grown children, he wrote (and four or five grandchildren), who also raised cats for a living. He felt the need of a family, he said. That was two years ago.

  So much depended on Lois—aside from his son she was the only one who really mattered to him—that he thought it would be best to leave without seeing her again. The problem was: Where to go? He was tired. He had been to too many places already, had used them up, had used himself up; in his time he had lived away from home (New York his home) in twenty-four states plus Canada and Mexico. After a while all places were alike. The trick was to get away from himself, an ultimate vacation, more expensive than he knew. While dragons of light clashed on his wall, he thought about it. (It was always there as something else to do, an untapped possibility, another place to visit.) In his whole life, he told himself, he had wanted not much: a family, something to do, love, accomplishment, talent, heroism; instead, at forty, he was alone with nothing. Why was that? Why? He wanted to know. A citizen, he had his rights. Dear God, what’s the matter with me? It was his only prayer.

  Dozing, he saw himself falling from the window, arms outstretched like a diver, somersaulting now onto his back, floating—what peace!—landing on the sidewalk like a feather, without a scratch. It struck him suddenly—why hadn’t he seen it before?—that he was indestructible. His secret. He lifted his head from the pillow, amazed at himself. A horn honked, thunder cracked in the cave of his skull. Rain fell at the entrance; it washed his face, cooled his heat. Lying on the sidewalk, he remembered voices from the past, old faces (his mother and father, Herbie, Rachel, his son Phil), a familiar world. They hugged and kissed one another and he told them what he had discovered about himself, that he was indestructible. No one seemed surprised. Then, in a buzz of voices, in a circle of attention, his eyes closed, and he fell asleep and forgot.

  At first glance the kitchen seemed to be empty, and Peter wondered if he hadn’t in a moment of madness hallucinated Lois’s return. But then he saw her, huddled on one of the gray metal kitchen chairs, her head tilted forward as if she were praying. Bent, she was staring at some glistening object in her lap, which, reflecting the overhead glare, looked as though it were on fire. The melodrama of preconception is inevitably inadequate to the facts. There was no fire. There was only, quite simply, a long stainless-steel carving knife across her lap, a red-knuckled hand clutching the handle. Absorbed in whatever it was she saw in the mirror of the blade, she gave no indication that she was even aware of his presence.

  “What are you doing?” he said, hovering over her now.

  A shiver went through her. There was no other answer.

  “Let me have it, please,” he said, holding out his hand. “Lois.”

  She crouched forward, shielding the knife with her body.

  “Please give me the knife, Lois.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then put the knife on the table.”

  “No.”

  To argue with her, he knew from experience, would only make her more resistant, but what could he do?

  “Lois …” For no reason, out of some pang of tenderness, he bent to kiss the top of her head.

  She jerked her head angrily, outraged, fending him off with her arm, the knife an extension of her hand. “Don’t!” Almost a scream.

  He thought at first that she had hurt herself, a patch of blood staining his shirt. “What happened?” he asked her, (what?) and then he realized that it was him, that he was bleeding, the wound without pain, his shirt damp. Suffocating. Panicked, he held the arm up with his other hand, a sick, muttering noise in his throat. Still holding the arm, his dignity a matter of caution, he walked bravely to the bathroom, ashamed that he was leaking so much of himself.

  The arm ached dully, his face a plastic white in the mirror.

  Sick to his stomach, he was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, his balance shaky, waiting in a daze of shock for the blood to stop, when Lois floated in. A part of his delirium? In his sickness—his face pimpled with sweat—he had the feeling that she was smiling at his expense, though not her mouth really—the rest of her face.

  “What can I do for you?” he said.

  Without a word, with nurselike efficiency she took care of his arm, stopped the bleeding, washed the blood away, bandaged the wound, using a light silk scarf she often wore, to hold the dressing in place. Through all this neither of them spoke.

  When she had finished, she asked him if it was too tight. He shrugged. “You’ll be okay,” she said. He planned to say something to her, but in the next moment, though he hadn’t seen her leave, she was gone.

  It to
ok him a while to find the energy of will necessary to get up, to leave. Clearly, he was tired. He was numb.

  She was curled up on the bed when he came in, her back to him, maybe sleeping, though he thought not.

  He lay down on his side of the bed, aware momentarily of the pulsing in his arm; then, with a sensed sigh of regret, fell asleep.

  He woke up—minutes later it seemed—to Lois’s kiss. She was leaning over him.

  “I like you when you sleep,” she said.

  He had been having a dream in which he was dying, but now it was gone. When he closed his eyes in search of the dream, he saw Lois, her black hair down to her waist, running through a red field, disappearing into the horizon, the memory of her flight like a shadow on the landscape. He was perpetually losing her.

  She was there. “I didn’t mean it, Peter,” she was saying. “I’m sorry. Believe—” but he kissed her, not wanting to hear any more, and she kissed him back, her face wet against his.

  She surmounted him, warm, demanding. Cunning. Her tears irresistible. As in a dream, his numbness unwintered. Revived, in a field of flowers, he fell in love with her—mouth, throat, nipples, breasts—but she was running away from him, slipping away into that endless red field; he held on for his life so as not to lose her, conscious at the same time of the weakness in his arm, forgetting even that at last, forgetting, losing himself, his life quickening. His life lost. Sacrificed. His eyes closed, he saw the blood pouring from his arm again. He held on for a while, though she was gone. It was over when it was.

  Afterward, lying next to him, her head on his arm, she told him that the reason for her bitchiness, for the blackness of her mood, was that she was having a child which she didn’t want—the responsibility a death to their freedom—but now that it seemed they loved each other, it didn’t seem as tragic as it had before. What did he think? she asked. He didn’t mind, he said. What does that mean? she wanted to know. She waited for an answer, but he was asleep, snoring contentedly, as if it didn’t matter one way or another. And it was a matter of life and death. It was.

  The next morning she was still in bed when he left for work. He thought to wake her—only the back of her head visible from beneath the covers—but decided to leave her a note instead.

  Lois,

  Don’t worry, honey. It’s O.K.

  Your loving husband,

  Peter

  He tiptoed out in the dark, the linoleum floor squeaking, his knee bumping against a chair; he felt like a thief. But what had he taken? More important: what had he left behind?

  When he arrived at the Bureau of Economic Research, he found that he had not so much been fired, as he had expected, as somehow forgotten.

  “What are you doing here?” the secretary at the front desk asked as he went by. She raised her penciled eyebrows.

  Philip S. Cappello, his boss—a fortyish, lapsed bohemian who wrote children’s books in his private life—seemed happy to see him, though for a moment there, between the smile and the wink, he couldn’t seem to remember Peter’s name. “Well … uh … I thought you’d given us up, Pete. What have you been doing, fella?” He leaned back expansively in his elastic chair. “I envy you, getting out of this jungle, I certainly do. You getting any writing done? What can I do you for, fella?”

  Apologizing, Peter explained that he had been through a domestic crisis but hoped he could keep his job, a matter of life or death. What else could he say without getting personal?

  Philip nodded understandingly, his smile like an arm around the shoulder, as Peter squeezed out his explanation. “Pete, old buddy,” he said, “this is no job for a guy like you. Your future, your whole life is ahead of you. You want to write—now’s the time, old buddy. Write. I wish to Christ I had your opportunity. I envy you, Pete.” He turned to the small window behind him, looked out at the street as if there were something there he wanted to see. “The fact is,” he said, “you’d been gone so long, we advertised for someone else.” When he turned back to face Peter he looked aggrieved, almost angry.

  “I’ve only missed three days,” Peter said. “Look, Phil—Mr. Cappello—I give you my word it won’t happen again. Besides, I need the job.” The more he had to give of himself to get it, humiliated at having to plead, the less he wanted the lousy job, but he hung on in deference to Cappello, who was ashamed of being a boss.

  Cappello raised his hands, fending off an imaginary blow; he smiled engagingly, wanting not only to be liked but also to be pitied—his entire life an accommodation to the eases of survival. “What can I say?” he said, his eyes averted. “You always talked about … you know … quitting to devote yourself to writing—which I respect, as you know—so that I thought you had finally done what you had been threatening to do. You see? I said to myself …” Then he stopped as if something had clicked off in his head, looked at Peter, scowled. “All right. You might as well work today while you’re here. Sit down.”

  Peter took his usual chair at the side of the desk. Cappello, glowering, handed him a copy of the manuscript they had been working on—“Cyclical Correspondences in German Banking 1905–1907 with Particular Reference to Munich and Hamburg.” “I’ll read first,” Cappello said, cleaning his horn-rimmed glasses, adjusting them on the swollen bridge of his nose. Then he took them off, his eyes naked, diffident.

  “Peter,” he wheezed faintly. “They blame me, fella, if you’re not here to work. Everyone’s in one big helluva hurry in this place and they just as soon put my ass in a sling as anyone’s. So, old buddy”—when he struck a match to light his cigar, his hand was shaking—“if you want to take off—I know how it is—just let me know in advance so I can get someone else. Please. Fact is, the guy who was supposed to come in to take your place didn’t show up.” He laughed, a broken sound. Peter liked Cappello, who always looked as if someone close to him had just died. “If you leave me in the lurch again, I’m going to have to let you go.” He put the glasses back on, squeezed out a smile, incapable of sustaining anger. “A word to the wise. Where were we? Another thing, no gabbing this morning, I’m afraid. No coffee break. We’re going to have to go at it extra hard”—he turned in his chair, and without getting up opened the window a few inches—“we have to make up, as you know, for all the time we’ve lost.” He looked at his watch as though he had recorded the loss to the minute.

  “I understand,” Peter said, studying the first sentence, yawning.

  “Right,” Cappello said, rubbing his hands together, a gesture of purpose. Then he called one of the secretaries and asked if she would bring them their morning coffee in the office, as they wouldn’t have the time—overloaded with work as they were—to pick it up from the cart themselves. “To work,” he said, starting in abruptly, taking Peter by surprise.

  “I’m sorry. I missed the first three words,” Peter said.

  Cappello started over. They read for twenty minutes without interruption, then spent the rest of the morning gabbing, trading anecdotes. Cappello did most of the talking. It passed the time.

  Cappello was reminiscing about his days at Bread Loaf—his writer days—when Herbie called. Peter was embarrassed, Cappello distraught; he stared compulsively at his watch while Peter talked, the minutes fleeing madly before his eyes, never to be recalled. The loss brought sweat to his forehead. Herbie, a big spender over the telephone, was inviting Peter to lunch to celebrate something or other—some deal he had negotiated. Peter looked at Cappello, sweated for his friend’s sweat, reluctantly accepted. Who was he to refuse a brother? What a question!

  “Don’t let it run on too long,” Cappello advised him, releasing Peter for lunch a few minutes early—at five to twelve. “We have a lot to do this afternoon, old buddy.”

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” Peter promised, shaking Cappello’s hand before he left, sorry that they wasted so much time between them.

  After the fanfare of his invitation, Herbie was uncommunicative during lunch; he chawed his steak, sipped his beer, basked (a vacationist)
in the sun of some secret knowledge, his gnarled eagle face made stolid by the burdens of wisdom.

  Confronted by his brother’s silence, Peter felt constrained to talk between bites of hamburger, above the noise of other conversations. “Lois and I are together again,” he said.

  Herbie just grunted. “Why’d you run off like that the other day?” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “Huh? What’s the matter with you?”

  Peter loaded his mouth with French fries. “I didn’t run off,” he muttered. “I just saw no point in staying.”

  “Come on. You ran off like a nervous turtle with a rocket up his ass. What were you afraid of, for God’s sake? What?”

  Peter choked on his food, trying to get out an answer. Herbie had no right to lecture him as though he were still a kid. He coughed until flames came to his eyes. “Look …” he said finally.

  “Ah, forget it,” Herbie said, waving his fork magnanimously. “I don’t care, but I feel responsible for you. Kid, I’d like to know—what’s your opinion of Gloria?”

  “She’s okay,” he said, slugging down his lukewarm coffee, but when he thought about it, the question struck a nerve, pained him unexpectedly; he remembered the look on her face as she came toward him, that dour smile of promise. “She’s okay,” he said again, meaning it hopefully.

  “Okay? She’s a great girl,” Herbie said, his mind on something else. “Yeah. And she likes you.” Herbie nervously turned in his chair, looking for something, squirming, counting the house—a man with a near-sighted eye out, a prospective investor in all concerns. “I have a kind of proposition for you,” Herbie said, craning his neck to see what might be seen. “An exchange of favors.”

  Peter finished his coffee, was ready to leave. Curious—his brother’s guest—he followed Herbie’s glance on a tour of the restaurant, table-hopping: nothing to see, not many attractive women, anyway; a few—a nice solid old girl of about forty sitting by herself—nice. She returned his stare, smirked; he retreated. What was it all about?

  “Peter, listen hard,” Herbie said, half rising, “any time you need something—money, advice—you can come to me. You know that. When I’m in on a good thing, a deal, you can count on a piece of it for yourself—it goes without saying. This time I need a favor, nothing I wouldn’t do for you if our positions were reversed.” In one motion, he turned to look at the door and bolted from his chair. “There she is. Take care of her for me, huh? I got to run, Pete, before she sees me. Be a good guy”—slipping a bill under Peter’s plate, a ten—“I’ll call …” In the middle of a word he was off, twisting through the crowd toward the back of the restaurant.