A Man to Conjure With

by Jonathan Baumbach

  They had dinner in the kitchen. His warmed-over hamburgers looked as if they had had a hard day; they bore up remarkably. Peter ate with little appetite, suspicious of everything, including the canned peas which deflated at the touch of his fork. Across the table Lois sipped her coffee.

  “What have you been doing all day?” he asked. Though he meant it to be a casual remark, it came out like an accusation.

  Lois looked up as if to make sure he was talking to her. “I haven’t been doing anything,” she said. “What have you been doing all day?”

  He told her, leaving out a little, making up some for the sake of the story, not mentioning Delilah, saving Sclaratti’s remark for another occasion.

  “Did you give rides to any beautiful girls?” she asked, pouring his coffee for him.

  “Only beautiful girls,” he said.

  Her arm jerked as if he had pushed her, the coffee spilling, trickling across the table. He made no effort to get out of its way.

  “I would have finished my homework,” she said, watching him change his pants, “but my mother kept me on the phone for hours and then your brother called. Peter, I didn’t mean to spill coffee on you.”

  “There was none as beautiful as you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “Do you like my hair this way?”

  He nodded, not looking. “What did Herbie want?”

  “You didn’t even notice that it was done a new way.”

  “I noticed,” he said, noticing for the first time an elaborate cabbage, withholding his disapproval. “Did Herbie want me to call him back?”

  “No.” Her fingers like bird beaks, she began impatiently to undo her hair. “You like it better when it’s hanging loose, don’t you?”

  It was always a problem for him whether to answer her honestly and risk the tense silence of her enmity, or to tell her what she wanted to hear, assuming (an impossible assumption) that he knew what it was. Anyway, he couldn’t win. And everything she did made him, who suspected her of all manner of betrayal, even more suspicious. But of what? And of whom? That he had no answers only testified further to the complexity of her deceit.

  So, he came up behind her and kissed the back of her head. Leaning against him, she pretended that he wasn’t there. “My mother invited us for dinner Friday night,” she said, moving away, picking hairpins from the floor. “I think she means it as a gesture of reconciliation.”

  “That’s very nice of her,” he said with invisible irony.

  “You don’t mean it,” she said, “but I’ve already accepted for us.”

  She had a predilection, a gift of instinct for irritating him. “You can go without me,” he said. He didn’t mean that either.

  She came back to him, her head at half-mast. “If you don’t want to go,” she said piteously, her eyes mysteriously wet, “I’ll call Mildred back and say we’re not coming.”

  “I don’t mind going,” he said, victimized by her tears. “It’s just that I wish you’d consult me before you … accept—you know.”

  “I won’t do it again, Peter.” She put her hand gently against his cheek. “I don’t want us to fight. You don’t think I do, do you?” She smiled love, tears washing her face.

  He resisted her, he tried.

  “You’re still angry,” she said.

  Exasperated, he insisted he wasn’t.

  She started to say something, then shrugged woefully with the grace of resignation, turning her head in a gesture of inexpressible hopelessness. “We don’t know how not to fight any more,” she said.

  What did she want from him? He reached out, put his arms around her, and overwhelmed, blazing with pity for her sorrow, kissed her eyes, her damp eyes, wanting only to make things right (everything wrong), pressing her to him, dissolved, mindless in the violence of his feelings.

  “You’re suffocating me,” she said at last.

  He released her, embarrassed, studying the long room of their apartment, which seemed strange to him, as if he had awakened into it after months of dreaming it.

  “Be gentle with me, Peter,” she said. She kissed him gently on the mouth, her salty tongue making an unexpected visit.

  “Be gentle,” she said again, searching for him with her body, then leading him to the bed as though he were taking her. “Do you love me very much?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, suddenly exhausted.

  On the bed, a white chenille spread covering it, in and out of their clothes (his argyle socks still on), they played with deadly seriousness, a child’s game. His heart wasn’t in it.

  “Poor old Peter,” she said, climbing on top of him, pinching, biting, pulhng hair. “You give up?”

  Didn’t he always? And he was suspicious. More than ever he was suspicious. The proof—how subtle!—was in the apparent absence of proof.

  Suspicion roused him. When she rolled away for a breather he came on.

  Her eyes pleaded for something. What?

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said, convalescing (the disease of private terror), her eyes the shutters of a haunted house.

  He hesitated. Nothing came of nothing.

  “I’m afraid of pain,” she said, which didn’t help his cause.

  He retreated; then, with the courage of anxiety, returned to the attack (not to be outdone by his betrayer), kissed her breasts, her mouth, in love with her, his wife, his child-bride of twenty-one—suspicious. She did her best.

  Their devils made love, their angels in private terror. Was this what it was all about? And yet there was pleasure, he worried, one inner eye watchful. And was she there at all?

  He listened for her song, and heard it, and didn’t hear it—and was it even meant for him?—his own song, his one note of song rising finally to its occasion, running its gamut amid cheers, plummeting, dying its life as if no one cared. (And she cared, she said.)

  Their love words were sung in silence, a more tenuous music. A more exacting silence.

  As he was falling asleep she asked, her mouth to his ear, “Will you still love me when I’m not a child any more?” He thought to answer, thought he had, and dreamed it instead: Yes. And what was the question?

  Sleepless in his dreams, he awoke in the dark, heavy and dull with sweat; her head, a stranger, weighted on his shoulder.

  When he freed his arm she mumbled something unintelligible from the dark pools of her sleep, and shivering, wrapped the blankets around her, curling up into them, an intimacy of need which excluded him.

  Lonely, he prowled the dreamlike room, a maze of shadows, feeling about on chairs and tables for his watch. It was always good to know the time, especially at night when you couldn’t sleep. After a while he found the watch on an end table, curled up against the belly of Lois’s purse. As nearly as he could make out, it was either five after three or one-fifteen, though he had no confidence that he was even looking at the right side of the watch. And then he lost interest in the time. There were other things. Lois’s black purse, for instance.

  The more he looked at it, tight-mouthed as it was, the more secrets it seemed to contain. And Lois, who had no right to secrets, was asleep.

  He carried the purse to the bathroom, holding it in his arms as though it were breakable, and alone in his sanctuary, bolted the door. He waited a while before he switched on the light, a painful brilliance, the tile shining at him like monstrous teeth.

  When he snapped it open, it yawned at him. A good spy, though inexperienced, newly obsessive, he looked around him, listened carefully for counterspies. The bed creaked. An all-night radio blared across the street. Fastidious, thick-fingered, Peter washed his hands, the purse resting open on the closed seat, awaiting surgery.

  What does a woman keep in her pocketbook? If she was Lois, she kept everything she couldn’t bear to throw away—souvenirs from old cracker jacks boxes, a broken sea shell, two empty lipsticks, a ball of silver, the cellophane from an old cigarette pack—everything. And a poem which he had to unfold to read.
Only four lines long, it was neatly printed on a half-sheet of loose-leaf paper, which had been folded over several times into a small square packet. This was more like it; the secret agent in him exulted, though he couldn’t get over the feeling that he was dreaming it all, or someone else was. He read:

  All us birds

  Have too many feathers

  To fly

  So we fly …

  Underneath, she had written: Remind Peter to buy coffee. He put everything back (in its place, he hoped) and closed the purse. Then on impulse, remembering something he had forgotten—the wallet at the bottom of things—he opened it again. It was there, in her red wallet, that he found, surprised at finding it, what he had been searching for.

  And what did he find? Like most explorers, he wasn’t sure (an undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns). He held it up to the light, a photo of Lois and some boy Peter had never seen before, a handsome couple in bathing suits, familiar with each other, her arm about his waist, his on her shoulder, the ocean in the background. Lovers? How could there be any doubt? It was an old picture—from last summer perhaps—but the fact that she still kept it in her wallet was evidence, more evidence than he wanted, of betrayal. He glowered at the boy, younger and handsomer than himself, his wife’s lover. Then. And now? The photo was its own testimony. That he had been wronged was as clear as his own reflection, which stared blearily, raw-eyed at him from the medicine-cabinet mirror—a mild, ugly face incapable of outrage. Who could blame Lois for preferring the boy in the picture? Peter could. And he did. Who else could he blame?

  He was putting the picture back into its laminated case, in a sleepwalker’s calm, when someone knocked on the door, startling him.

  “What are you doing in there, Peter?” Lois said.

  What was he doing? He pulled the chain, stuffed the wallet into the purse, snapped the purse closed, and worried that she knew what he was doing. “I’ll be right out,” he called, pulling the chain again absent-mindedly.

  “Are you sick or something?” she said. “Peter?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been in there for hours, honey. Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be out in a few minutes,” he said, trying to think of some reasonable explanation for his behavior, which had none. He had no idea what to do with Lois’s pocketbook, which loomed menacingly on the toilet seat as though there were a bomb inside.

  When he listened closely he could almost hear the bag ticking, or was it the kitchen clock he heard? Some other bomb? If the roar in his head was any indication, something was going to explode. He had been in worse predicaments—especially in the Army—but he had never, or so it always seemed at the present, been so thoroughly in the wrong. An absurd predicament for a grown man, still growing.

  He washed his hands again, the same bleak face glaring at him owlishly in the mirror.

  In a few minutes he evacuated the bathroom, carrying the handbag behind his back. A shadow, Lois was standing there, waiting for him.

  “Peter, what’s the matter? What are you holding behind your back?”

  With a sigh, he gave up the purse.

  She took it from him with barely a sound—a sharp, sudden groan of breath—and went in a great hurry to her dresser, putting the bag away noisily in the bottom drawer.

  On her way back to the bathroom she muttered in a strange voice, not looking at him, “You just can’t be trusted, can you?” And then she was in the bathroom, the door locked against him.

  He hovered outside the door a few minutes, his head crowded with explanations, but when she gave no sign of coming out, he straggled hopelessly to the bed, bumping his knee against some provident chair in the dark.

  Unable to sleep, he waited for her in the hollow center of their double bed, sobs coming from the bathroom, rising and falling. Her cries—Peter listened fitfully—seemed to go on for an endless time, choking, drowning sounds. He felt their tremors as if they were his own, which, for all he knew, maybe they were. He awoke in the morning, convinced that he hadn’t slept at all, surprised to find Lois curled under the covers next to him as if nothing had happened. There was no mention of the bag during breakfast, and Peter was almost willing to believe that he had dreamed what he had dreamed. Then, ready for school, Lois took her purse from the bottom drawer and said good-bye.

  Sclaratti had warned Peter never to let a passenger out of his sight. But Peter was trusting, and though he took Sclaratti seriously, liked first of all to keep his eye on the road. And second of all: he worried; that is, he anticipated the possibilities of disaster. In the dark eye of his imagination, he saw Lois and the boy in the photo betraying him in a variety of postures, to pay him back for his suspicions, and finally, inevitably—he could imagine nothing worse—he saw Lois leaving him, his failure, his loss. And when he thought of it, pushing his way through New York City traffic, water rushed to his eyes, and though he wouldn’t cry—refused on manful principle to cry—his windshield seemed to cloud over despite him, and he had the sensation of staring out at the world from within a fish bowl. Sometimes he even had to purse his lips to breathe. And still he coveted, in his lust’s eye, Gloria, and looked forward to his daily meetings with the fair Delilah, his only nymph, his most regular passenger.

  Delilah, in her way, became more and more demanding.

  “Driver,” she said in her mock-imperious voice, “take me for a ride in the country and don’t spare the horses. And don’t spare the pedestrians.” (This was the day after Peter’s discovery of the photo.)

  “This taxi only goes to Sutton Place, lady,” he said, too full of Lois, thinking perhaps he should call her, perhaps he shouldn’t, to pay much attention to Delilah.

  “Who’s paying for this ride?” she wanted to know. “Please,” she cajoled. “Take me to the park, Peter. I’ll be a good girl, I promise. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease …”

  “No,” he grumbled, unable to shake his depression, and drove absently toward the park. Forsythia were in bloom. And so, he noticed, looking golden in his mirror, was Delilah.

  “Can we stop?” she asked as they entered the park. “You can leave the meter running if you like.” “What for?”

  “What for?” she mimicked him. “For the love of it. That’s what for.” She sulked at his insensitivity.

  “Where do you get all your money?” he asked.

  “Where do you get all your money?”

  “From you,” he said, and she giggled.

  “If I tell you,” she said, leaning over the seat to whisper it in his ear, “will you stop and park?”

  He was thinking about it when he noticed a cop car coming up behind him, closing the distance between them. Guilty as always—but what had he been caught doing?—he resentfully awaited the justice of his punishment.

  “My father gives me a handsome allowance,” she said. “It’s called child support, if you must know.”

  The police car pulled up alongside and then, as Peter alerted his foot to the brake, sped by him, spewing exhaust fumes through his unrolled window. He marveled at his luck.

  “I can afford it,” she said, “if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  He kept going, wondering why the cop had passed him and why, in passing, he had looked at him in that jaundiced way.

  “My father’s a very nice man,” she said contentiously, as if she expected an argument. “He is. Though he won’t tell this to anyone, he’s not even sure that he’s my father, if you know what I mean, because my mother, you certainly know who she is, she’s a woman of questionable moral character. A who-er. He loves me anyway, and gives me lots and lots of money because, as you can see, I’m a great prize. A great bee-you-ty!” She crossed her eyes in illustration. “Don’t you think so? You don’t have to, because it’s a livid fact, a livid, livid fact. … Do you think I’m pretty?”

  “Pretty noisy,” he said. On sudden impulse he pulled off the road, parking the cab under a tree.

  From inside his fi
sh bowl, he watched leafless trees, birth-ridden, recoiling in the wind, and beyond the trees he could see to a semicircle of benches, old men with Daily Newses also swaying in the breeze, and still beyond them, surrounded by clover and winter weeds, a boy and girl were embracing in the grass, inextricably entangled, oblivious of being watched. He painted them in his mind on a beach of white sand, no longer seeing them.

  “What are you, Mr. Cabdriver, some kind of nut or something?” she said. When he looked up, Delilah was in the seat next to him, the sun in her hair, the sun itself.

  “What are you looking at?” she said softly, as if aware of his mood.

  He shrugged. When he looked again beyond the flight of trees, it was gone. They—the couple in the picture—had moved on.

  “Do you know,” she said, “that next to my father you’re the saddest-looking man I’ve ever seen?”

  He forced a smile and choked on it.

  “The absolutely saddest-looking man,” she crooned. “Absolutely saddest I ever saw.”

  “Cut it out,” he said, a sob escaping from his throat.

  “Maybe we’d better go,” she said, sucking on a strand of hair, her mouth disappointed at the taste.

  For some reason he remembered his father taking him to the movies, and his surprise when during a sentimental scene—he had been too young to understand its implications—he realized that his father was crying. They had to leave before the end.

  Feeling pasted together—the trees moving off as in a dream—he climbed out of the cab with exceeding care.

  He ran, heavy-legged, too tired to walk …

  The current against him, turning him back. Swimming, unable to swim. Too much grief. Too much … Tide washing over him, leaving its debris of dead fish and sea shells, hair nets and algae on white sand. Face down in the grass, he cried out his grief. A grown man, he cried. The wind soughed among the trees. And somewhere: somewhere …

  When timeless minutes later he returned to his cab, Delilah was gone. He looked around, not knowing where to look, exhausted, calling to her: Delilah, Delilah, for God’s sake, his voice boomeranging in the wind. On the trails of instinct, a dreamwalker, he wandered off to look for her among the benches of studious old men.