A Man to Conjure With
by
Jonathan Baumbach
FOR MY FATHER AND MOTHER
Part i
| 1 |
Peter Becker stood at the top of the steps, shuffling his bulk, aimlessly knocking snow from the sides of his shoes. His feet were already wet. It was just a matter of not tracking dirt inside — the dirt already there its own responsibility. Waiting, he waited, though as he hadn’t pressed the buzzer (his index finger had hovered over it, had toured the air around it like a wary fly), it couldn’t be said that he was waiting for anyone other than himself. Peter Becker, meet Peter Becker — impatient but in no special hurry, waiting for himself. Now that he was home, now that he had traveled three thousand miles to return to New York, now that he had located Lois’s apartment in the Village and was, his feet cold, standing at the door, he saw no point in actually ringing the bell. What was there to say? If he stood in the cold long enough — the snow beginning to fall lightly again — he’d think of something or freeze his ass off in the process. Mostly he was afraid of discovering how the past thirteen years (almost fourteen since their last meeting) had changed them both. And after all — the reason for his coming to see her — what had they changed from? He wanted to know. In the afternoon from his squalid hot box of a hotel room he had rung Lois’s number but when she answered, an unfamiliar voice, he hung up without speaking. Without the benefit of being seen, he was unable to identify himself — a greater problem for Peter than for most. He had no memory of his own face; it surprised him each time he saw his youthful reflection in the mirror goggling out at him like an eavesdropper. In the wars of his life, he had been continuously and decisively defeated, while his face, through some private truce, continued to register the pride of indifference. He would be forty in March. What a lie his life had been!
Convinced that he had forgotten his own face, Peter had the illusion nevertheless that he remembered Lois perfectly, though when he willed her into memory she always showed up a little out of focus as though the camera had been jarred at the moment of record. The past a province of nostalgia, his recollections of her improved with age. Was it merely nostalgia? He was willing to believe that despite the violent failure of their marriage, he had loved her more intensely than any of the girls and women who wandered through the maze of his life after he had lost her. Standing at the door to her apartment now, almost fifteen years after their first meeting, he could not remember why (exactly) they had broken up except that he had a knack, a positive talent, for spoiling things. He wiped his eyes. A fool, a dull and mawkish clown, he had been a weeper all his life. These days when he went to the bathroom he suffered a sense of loss. He pushed the buzzer, then recoiled as if he had detonated a bomb. Perhaps he had.
“Is one ever a hero to himself?” he was saying, but no one was listening. On the other side of the room his wife and mother-in-law were chattering busily, their heads so close together that it was hard for him to tell where one began and the other left off. He leaned back in his lumpy armchair, and content for the moment with his world, bored into contentment, he closed his eyes. Even if they didn’t talk to him — actually seemed to ignore him when they got together — he was glad to have reconciled Lois with her mother. Family was important to him. His own mother had died when he was twelve, and his father, a traveling musician, a chronic wanderer, was never around for long. In marrying Lois, a further bonus for giving up the miseries of his freedom, he had inherited intact a second-hand family — almost like new. Fine. He liked the somber diffidence of Lois’s father, a quiet and gentle alcoholic. The problem was that he found it difficult — really impossible — to bear Lois’s mother, who was always around, always whispering malice in Lois’s ear, a soured woman who advertised her discontent as if everyone else were responsible for it. (Anyway, he was getting used to her.) “Peter, how do you like it?” one of them said. “Mildred and I decided to swap heads for a week.” And when he looked up, he saw Mildred’s head on Lois’s body. He covered his eyes.
“Peter, for God’s sake …”
“What?” Startled, not yet awake, he had the curious sensation that she had seen into his dream.
“You shouldn’t sleep so much during the day.”
“Who’s sleeping?” He opened his eyes as though it were a great feat of strength, looked around sightlessly, yawned. “What time is it?” he asked, as though it mattered.
“It’s time to wake up,” she said, tickling him. “It’s okay, old Peter — my mother’s gone.”
“Where did she go?” he wondered, his eyes closing again.
“Where should she go? She went home. Peter …” She shook him. “Mildred thought you were very ill-mannered, falling asleep while she was here as your guest.”
“Guest?” His eyes sprung open, a sallow-green wall stared back at him. “Your mother’s here more than I am.” A chronic loser, he didn’t want to start a fight. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Lois was laughing. “And you were snoring, Peter. You were really noisy. It upset Mildred. No one’s allowed to snore in Mildred’s house.”
He held her damp face in his hands, in love with her, his wife of three weeks, his beauty.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said, pulling away, “or something. I can’t bear looking at this place any more.”
He agreed sullenly, feeling somehow rejected, a weight of depression on his chest.
Outside, the snow was falling lightly, the sidewalk already encrusted with the snow and sleet remnants of a week of almost unrelieved bad weather. He held her blue-mittened hand as they walked.
At the corner, as they were waiting to cross, Lois said matter-of-factly, “Why did you marry me, Peter?”
When he didn’t answer, she took her hand away, no longer his gift, and put it in her pocket. “I really want to know,” she said.
“I think the sun was in my eyes,” he said. His chest hurt.
“What does that mean?” she said.
“I was kidding,” he said.
“Everything’s a joke, isn’t it?”
Were they both out of their minds? he wondered. They walked apart, the tension of their grief separating them like a third person.
“I’m cold,” she complained, the break in the silence a gesture of truce.
“Should we go back?” He took her arm. The snow, apparently suspended in the air, phosphorescent in the early dark. Watching her — a whitened green scarf covering her black hair, grayed by the snow, her eyes mourners at some unattended funeral — he was touched with love for her, his face burning in the cold.
“Let’s go back now,” he said.
She glanced at him, smiling queerly. “I‘m just beginning to enjoy walking,” she said. “Really, I’m not cold any more, old Peter.” She pressed his hand against her side.
When they passed a grocery store, Lois stopped him. “We’re out of coffee,” she said. “Do you have any money?”
He searched his pockets as a matter of course. “I left my wallet on the dresser,” he admitted. “Why didn’t you tell me before we left the house?”
She shrugged, bemused. “Do you mind having tea with dinner?”
“I don’t care.”
“That’s too bad, because I don’t think we have any. There’s some milk in the refrigerator, but it’s about four days old.” She squeezed his arm affectionately. “Do you know, we’re two of a kind.”
“Lois,” he said, a moment’s hesitation, “why did you ask why I married you?”
She shook her head. “Because you’re a man to conjure with.”