The Pavilion of Former Wives Read online

  PRAISE FOR JONATHAN BAUMBACH

  “[Baumbach’s] style lends itself well to settings of paranoid American noir, a miasma of sunglasses, pistols, and deadpan. For readers who enjoy that ilk, Baumbach delivers a nice, dark magic show.”

  —Library Journal

  “Jonathan Baumbach has been a hero of mine since I started writing. I was then, and remain today, avid for novelists who push the limits of the novel’s form without sacrificing its traditional human juices. Baumbach is just such a writer.”

  —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MAJOR FICTION

  “Jonathan Baumbach’s retrospective collection showcases more than thirty years of work from an underappreciated writer. Baumbach employs a masterfully dispassionate, fiercely intelligent narrative voice whose seeming objectivity is always a faltering front for secret passion and despair…. In his recent stories, Baumbach relies less on the surreal effects he favored in the past, but he remains staunchly independent from the literary mainstream.”

  — The New York Times Book Review

  “All fourteen stories in this collection are very good, and several are perfect gems. Baumbach, author of eight previous works of fiction, writes about ordinary people living essentially normal lives, but does so with such inventiveness and humor that their stories are transformed into something extraordinary. His characters bring fresh perspectives to bear on the world. They retell tales, veering from the truth, resculpting it to fit their mood or their audience.... Baumbach is not afraid to take risks with his fiction, and in this collection they pay off handsomely.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Jonathan Baumbach is far more than the witty biographer of Major Fiction. The fact is, major fiction would be of lesser rank without him.”

  —Robert Coover, author of The Brunist Day of Wrath

  “This wonderful book of stories, if only because of its title, invites comparison and then stands the test: this is major fiction. Which is not to say that the book is not hilarious—it is, and in a major way. Many of us who love contemporary fiction know that Jonathan Baumbach has been doing work of the first order for years; The Life and Times of Major Fiction, if there’s any justice in the literary world, should bring him the wider recognition he deserves.”

  —Russell Banks, author of Continental Drift and The Darling

  “ The Life and Times of Major Fiction is a dazzling sampler of pleasures. Jonathan Baumbach writes gorgeous prose and he has a rare comic/tragic vision, especially of love.”

  —Hilma Wolitzer, author of The Doctor’s Daughter

  “This new collection of Baumbach’s stories is fresh and startling, as ever. In The Life and Times of Major Fiction, he seems to reach new heights while cutting deep into the sense of loss that is both public and private. His engagement of the reader is so direct and so masterful that in response we cannot separate our hearts from our heads—and that is the enchantment of good fiction.”

  —Maureen Howard, author of Facts of Life

  BABBLE

  “Baumbach has a real gift for alchemizing fictional ‘autobiography’ into the pure gold of comic terror.”

  —Newsweek

  “Humane, imaginative deftly composed…”

  —Boston Globe

  “Touching and wildly funny. Should be read by everyone.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “A brilliant conceit, endlessly inventive, a book of immense tenderness.”

  —Maureen Howard, author of Facts of Life

  CHEZ CHARLOTTE AND EMILY

  “A wonderful balance of ease and authority, subtlety and surprise, wisdom and playfulness…the balance is almost magical.”

  —Robert Coover, author of The Brunist Day of Wrath

  “A brilliant novel…it is playful and unpredictable, a delightful instructive piece of reel life.”

  —Hollins Critic

  DREAMS OF MOLLY

  “It’s comic, almost zany in tone, with a plot that is suspenseful even as it resists interpretation; reading it feels a bit like watching a David Lynch film.”

  —New York Observer

  “A knock at the door of memory, and everything answers, all the more we didn’t know we really did want to know. A beautiful book.”

  —Joseph McElroy, author of Women and Men and Ancient History

  THE PAVILION

  OF FORMER

  WIVES

  THE PAVILION

  OF FORMER

  WIVES

  FICTIONS

  JONATHAN BAUMBACH

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  THE PAVILION OF FORMER WIVES. Copyright © 2016, text by Jonathan Baumbach. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Baumbach, Jonathan, author.

  Title: The pavilion of former wives / by Jonathan Baumbach.

  Description: First editon. | Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016012143 | ISBN 9781941088616

  Classification: LCC PS3552.A844 A6 2016 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012143

  First US edition: December 2016

  Interior design by Michelle Dotter

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and names appearing in this work are a product of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  THE PAVILION OF FORMER WIVES

  ACTING OUT

  SEATTLE

  THE STORY

  TRAVELS WITH WIZARD

  THE READING

  SHAPESHIFTING

  OFFICE HOURS

  LOST CAR

  THE NIGHT WRITER

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF LOVE

  APPETITE

  SUSPICIONS

  WALKING THE WALK

  To Aurora and Rohmer

  THE PAVILION OF FORMER WIVES

  One morning over coffee, a personals ad in B’s favorite intellectual journal grabbed his attention. He wasn’t actually reading the journal—he was thinking of what to do with the unsubscribed day ahead of him—when his eye, notoriously eager, arbitrarily browsed the ad. Its come-on line was, WHY FLY TO HORRORS THAT YOU KNOW NOT OF. Why indeed? The ad argued that a new relationship was likely to be as bad or worse than former disasters which might have been prevented through the wisdom of retrospect. It advocated visiting the digital Pavilion of Lost Loves at the New London County Fair, where, in a secure and protective environment, the seeker could revisit past relationships and, by rediscovering where they had hit the skids, possibly make right what had once gone terribly wrong.

  “Crap!” said B, though later that day he got his car out of the high-rent garage where it spent the better part of its cloistered life and drove through oppressive traffic and seemingly endless road repair to New London. As it turned out, “Pavilion” was a misnomer. The whole enterprise—not easy to locate among the snarl of the fair—consisted of a small booth attended by a somewhat dowdy woman of uncertain age. Behind the booth, there was a closed door leading to an enclosure perhaps not much larger than a closet. After B presented himself, the woman, a Ms. Clover (her identity attested to by a nametag over her right breast), her thick hair in a tight bun, he
r glasses pink with transparent frames, said that she would be his guide on this trip into the domestic past. First, though, she had some questions for him. Names and dates mostly, basic information. His answers, some of them lies, were typed into the round-screened computer in front of her with a kind of energized slow motion.

  “Is it only relationships with former wives that you wish to revisit?” she asked.

  “I guess,” he said. “I hadn’t planned on anything else.”

  “We can do as many as five former lovers in a session,” she said. “There’s no extra charge.”

  He hadn’t thought about the charge. “How much is this going to cost me?”

  She studied him a moment before answering. “Ninety-five plus tax. You can use your debit card if you like.”

  “I hadn’t planned on spending that much money,” he said.

  “That’s too bad,” she said, looking at him with what he took to be regret. “I’m offering you our off-season rate.”

  B considered returning to his car, which was on the far left side of the supplemental lot, and making the long trip through oppressive traffic and thwarting road repair to his lonely apartment with nothing to show for the time already invested in the enterprise before him.

  Ms. Clover pretended not to look at him while waiting for his decision. “Did I mention,” she said, “that the entrance fee is fully refundable less tax if you’re not a hundred percent satisfied with your experience at the pavilion?”

  “I think that’s a good policy,” he said, “though I don’t remember you mentioning it before.”

  She gave her wrist a pantomime slap. “What were you thinking, Julia?” she said to herself. “Where was your head? If I didn’t mention it, and I will take your word for it on this occasion, you have the right if you choose to take your trip down memory lane, as we sometimes call it at the Pav, without the usual charge.”

  B felt the penalty for her mistake, even though he was the beneficiary of it, was excessive. “I think I should pay something,” he said.

  After he unlocked the door with the key offered him, he warily stepped into a room very much like the bedroom of the house he’d lived in with his most recent former wife. The details, the colors of the bedspread, the paintings on the wall, were remarkably close to the overall picture memory offered. He briefly wondered how they were able to get it this right on such short notice.

  After a moment, an attractive woman who didn’t quite resemble his third wife (though dressed in her clothes) entered the room. “I thought we agreed that you would stay downstairs,” she said. “Isn’t that what we agreed on?”

  It struck him that he had played out a scene very much like the one he had just wandered into, though he had only the vaguest recollection of how he had responded to his wife’s demand that he exile himself. He had probably made some equally obnoxious remark in return.

  “What are we fighting about?” he asked in what he thought of as a conciliatory tone.

  “We’re not fighting,” she said. “We’re just staying out of each other’s way. If you insist on being up here, I’m going to stay downstairs.”

  The tone of her voice plus the substance of her remarks were provoking, but B did what he could to keep his poise. He felt no sympathy for her, though he stirred the ashes of former affection hoping to find an ember.

  “Well,” she said, her arms folded in front of her, “are you going or am I going?”

  He had to shake himself to remember that this was not the real thing, merely a clever simulation. Still it was as painful in its own way, or so he suspected, as the first time around, which until this moment he had been pleased to forget. Anyway, since he was here in the spirit of melioration, he strove to be reasonable. “I’ll go downstairs,” he said, “but first tell me what I’ve done that seems so unforgivable to you.”

  She shook her head and stamped her foot. “Don’t be such a woosie,” she said. “No one respects a man who doesn’t stand up for himself.”

  “Is that why you’re angry at me, because I don’t stand up for myself? I’m trying, don’t you see, to make things better between us.”

  “But that’s not what you’re feeling, is it?”

  It was true that B was angry at her—hadn’t he been provoked?— though trying to keep his edginess from getting out of hand. “How the fuck do you know what I feel?” he asked.

  She laughed. “I like you better this way. For a moment, I remembered what it was like to like you…. Look, don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Is that what I was doing?”

  “Just don’t get your hopes up.”

  His anger at her slapped at the back of his head, pounded his chest, stomped on his toe. Was this the way it had been? B took a deep breath, petitioned for forgiveness, while she raised the level of her abuse. His cumulative anger, the unholy extent of it, frightened him. He imagined himself shaking her violently, pieces of her coming loose. Instead he picked up a rickety chair and smashed it against the wall. Though the flying chair had come nowhere near her, she visibly flinched. “Was I being a woosie then?” he asked, the question choosing him. He felt embarrassed and aggrieved by his tantrum.

  “No,” she said, “you were just being an asshole.”

  It seemed to him that exile almost anywhere, upstairs, downstairs, the next county, outer space—wasn’t that why they got divorced?— was preferable to being in her company. Though he could no longer remember any of the details, he knew for a fact that they had once lived together amicably, had once in fact for an extended period of time been devoted to each other. And then what? It must have taken a while to reach this extreme point of disrepair in their marriage, bad feelings turning to worse and worse and worse. In any event, the paradigm of hell they were reenacting was clearly beyond salvage. B considered escaping through his original passage of entry, though a more complex instinct trapped him in the room.

  What he did next was not premeditated, or if it was, he successfully short-circuited any awareness of intention. He sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands and let his eyes fill with tears as if they would have it no other way.

  She studied him from wherever she was in the room, or so he sensed; he could just about feel the weight of her glance on his back. The next thing he knew she was seated next to him, an arm draped around his shoulders. “I’m sorry you feel so bad,” she whispered, a secret perhaps from the self that hated him. B resented the superiority implied by her pity.

  A sound of inchoate fury, a growling sound he had never heard himself make before, emerged from his throat, startling them both.

  “What?” she asked.

  He had no answer, had no idea what was at stake in her question. “I’m all right,” he insisted despite compelling evidence otherwise. The comfort he took from her arm on his shoulder filled him with self-loathing. There was no longer any need to deny her charges against him: he was a woos, as she claimed. His head drooped against her shoulder in acknowledgment of woos-like defeat. Worse still, he had a hard-on with its own private agenda. His deepest wish, will fully unacknowledged, was to move into her womb and never leave. Enraptured by her embrace, he was blissfully immobile, though also desperate to get away. The word love sat on his tongue like a blister.

  “It’s not you I hate, it’s myself,” she said. “You see that, don’t you?”

  Lost in himself, he had no idea what she was getting at but her words nevertheless released him. Abruptly aware of his prick’s agenda, he kissed her neck to foster its cause.

  “I don’t want that,” she said, taking back her arm.

  That was when he got up from the bed. “The hell with you,” he said under his breath.

  In the next moment, they were as far away from each other as the room allowed.

  A few minutes later he was again standing in front of the Pavilion of Lost Loves facing Ms. Clover, who seemed to have found her way back to her former dowdy role. If he weren’t still in despair over his revisited disaster, he might have
been impressed at the lightning speed with which Clover had effected her costume change.

  “What went wrong?” he asked her.

  “I thought you knew,” she said. “Look, I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Well, not to make too much of it, you fucked up.”

  B was momentarily taken aback, but resisted offering any of the various barely credible defenses that immediately came to mind. “You know what,” he said, “can we do this? I’d like to revisit this relationship fifteen years earlier. There were difficulties then—in fact, I was still married to someone else—but that was the high point of my relationship with Wife Three, as you call her in your notes.”

  “We can do that,” she said, “but in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say if you visit Wife Three again it will count on your record as a visit to another lost love. If that’s acceptable, I’m prepared to proceed. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” And though in the next moment he experienced a few twinges of regret, perpetually wary of getting what he wanted, he held his ground. “I think so,” he added.

  “After I go through the door, I’d like you to count slowly to three hundred before making your entrance. Okay?”

  “I have a watch,” he said, checking his wrist to verify his claim. “You’re asking me to wait five minutes, isn’t that it?”

  “For best results,” she said, “please follow instructions to the letter. We feel that counting adds a necessary human element.” And then as she closed the door behind her, he heard her whisper, “One…two…three…”

  B counted to sixty, which was tedious enough, then let four more minutes tick off on his watch, then he counted to twenty-five before opening the door. He found himself at the bottom of a long stairwell and, not wanting to think about how Clover managed the trick, climbed up the four flights to the apartment his third wife lived in for a period before she was his third wife, and knocked at the door. He heard some remote signs of life in the apartment so that he knew that the lack of response was not an indicator of no one being home. He knocked again. “What is it?” a woman’s voice inquired.