A Man to Conjure With Read online

  | 2 |

  In one of Peter Becker’s painting classes—he was taking a beginners’ and an advanced course at the same time—there was an undernourished, dark-haired girl who generally worked at the easel in front of him when he was able to arrange it that way. He thought she was beautiful, too thin perhaps, her ankles thick; yet the whole effect gripped his chest with longing. Her name was Lois Black—she followed Keith Battlecarp on the roll; Peter came last because he had registered late—and her painting had a kind of ingenuous charm, he liked to believe, which more than made up for its innocence of skill. They became friends before he had a chance to worry about it. He worried anyway.

  At nineteen, Lois Black had retired from the world, but had consented to live in it as a token of her exile. She was now in her third year of college, majoring in education for her mother’s sake, drinking coffee in the cafeteria for her own when she met Peter Becker. Something about him amused her. He was in a painting class she took at night—another excuse to get out of her mother’s house—though it was in the college cafeteria that she first became aware of him. Carrying a cup of coffee, holding it out in front of her like a shield, she was looking for a place to sit when she noticed Peter, only barely familiar then, alone at a last-row table. She remembered him from her class—a big fellow who always looked as if he was angry about something. He had a good face; he almost never smiled. In a mood to talk, she sat down across from him, unnoticed, Peter musing, looking out the window. Strewn across the long orange table, the day’s debris—balls of wax paper, empty cigarette packs, coffee-sopped napkins, the twisted core of an apple—chaperoned them. Lois sipped her coffee, smiling to herself. She envied him his capacity for detachment, a necessary grace.

  “Hello,” she said tentatively. No response. Two gumchewing girls at the other end of the table turned to look at her, smiled. She glowered at them for their presumption, turned away, gulped her coffee, searing the roof of her mouth. Why should he acknowledge her existence? She hardly believed in it herself.

  When finally he noticed her he seemed embarrassed by her presence, as if she had caught him in a moment of terrible privacy. His dark face opened up, yielded an awkward smile which left him strangely naked. How vulnerable he was!

  Now that he was facing her, grinning foolishly, she had nothing to say. She nodded, smiling. He nodded back, his smile like an ache.

  “What …?” he started to say.

  “How do you …?” She stopped herself. “Go ahead.”

  “You …”

  She waited for him to continue; he waited for her, his smile cracking under the strain.

  “This is insane,” she said, hardly able to hear herself above the din. “Do you …?” She had forgotten her question.

  He was his old grim self. “We’re in the same class,” he said solemnly.

  “I know,” she said. “Do you think it’s a significant coincidence?”

  He looked puzzled. People were getting up around them, though she hadn’t heard the bell ring. Could she have missed it? She glanced reflexively at the clock.

  “You ought to use a wider range of colors,” he said irrelevantly.

  “Okay,” she said, amused, annoyed. “It’s getting late,” she said, getting up.

  He hesitated. “You go ahead. I don’t think I’ll go to class tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not making enough progress,” he said, looking down at the table as if he were angry at something.

  “Maybe I don’t know anything,” she said, “but it seems to me you’re one of the best in the class. Really, I think your work’s very interesting, though I think it would improve if you used a smaller range of colors.”

  He acknowledged her joke with a sad smile, then went on with his lament. “I’ve been painting for over a year,” he said, “and I should be much better by this time than I am.”

  “You will be better,” she said. “You will. I have faith.”

  He shook his head, but when she started to leave, he went along with her to class.

  The next night she found him at the same table, a half-hour earlier, apparently waiting for her. He waved as she approached.

  “Do you have another home besides the cafeteria?” she asked him. His answer was a shrug. Yet he seemed almost foolishly happy to see her, his feelings naked in his eyes; overvalued, she thought better of herself.

  After a while she began to anticipate their regular meetings in the cafeteria, but guileful, withheld her joy, surprised and frightened of it. (Curiously, they almost never spoke in class.)

  Questioning him, she learned that he worked during the day as a clerk in a shoe store (only for the money), and that he attended classes at night, some for credit, some not. He was twenty-five, among other things. He had been in the Army. He lived alone. An older brother was his closest relative, his mother dead, his father in the city only a few months out of the year. After three weeks she knew almost everything about him there was to know, except who he was. She made games of his questions—she had more to hide—but with all her evasions managed to tell him more about herself than she had ever given away before. They were old friends in three weeks, domesticated before they had even so much as kissed. Their bodies brushed occasionally, though it remained unacknowledged.

  After class he would walk with her to the bus, waiting on the corner with her, dawdling like a lovesick schoolboy, until the bus stole her away; each parting brought an ache of loss as though she were leaving his life never to return. Once she was out of sight, he despaired of ever seeing her again. Still, their friendship did not go beyond their ostensibly casual meetings in the cafeteria. Both were afraid of disenchantment. Lois wondered why he didn’t ask her out, jealous of his time without her, though it would only have made things more difficult for her. She had a boy friend, Stanley, whom she was going to marry eventually—her concession to an otherwise anonymous future. Every Saturday night for over a year she had been seeing Stanley—it gave form to her life—her life needed form. They had an arrangement, a semblance of an engagement; she wore his pin. They were lovers. On occasion, mostly out of boredom, she accepted other dates without telling Stanley, feeling guilty afterward, then telling him. Poor Stanley, she thought; her dreams were unfaithful to him. Poor Lois! Poor Peter! She began to wonder if she hadn’t misinterpreted Peter’s interest in her.

  When Peter finally asked for a date, she accepted before he could finish his invitation. “I was really afraid you would say no,” he said. She was astonished. “Why?”

  He shrugged, self-deprecating. “Because I wanted it too badly.”

  “Don’t give yourself away so much,” she said. He turned away in pain. God, she hated herself sometimes!

  Immediately afterward, during class, she regretted her decision. Her friendship with Peter was fine the way it was. Why create new difficulties? If she could conceive of a future with him, it might be worth the risks involved (involvement a risk in itself), but otherwise she stood to lose what she had and gain nothing in its place. She needed the security of Stanley. And Peter—Peter, like a huge stuffed Teddy bear—made her happy; he was a luxury. She loved him in a way, but it was not to be confused with adult love. And clearly, Peter had no future—he was so obviously vulnerable. As soon as she decided to break the date she worried about how she would tell him, the lies of explanation like sores on her tongue.

  And then, leaving the classroom with him, she lost her nerve.

  “Can we go somewhere and talk?” she started clumsily—the start always the hardest.

  “I have my brother’s car,” he said, in a buoyant mood. “I’ll drive you home if you like.”

  “Look, Peter, about Friday night …”

  “What?” His face seemed held together by paste, on the verge of splitting into a thousand fragments. “I’ll tell you later,” she said, pitying him, frightened.

  “What?”

  They were attracting attention. “I’ll tell you in the car,�
� she said softly.

  They were at the top of a stairwell. He glanced at her darkly, then rushed down the steps as if he had just recalled another appointment. She had to run to catch up with him.

  Seated in his car—an indefinably old gray Plymouth—she didn’t know where to begin. “I’m engaged to be married” was all she could think of to say.

  Murmuring something unintelligible, he drove off.

  “We can still continue being friends,” she said as he exploded through a red light. “Nothing is changed.”

  Peter’s head jerked slightly, as if he were about to say something, his silence an act of will.

  She hated the melodrama of his hurt, sorry she had been its agent.

  He drove fiercely, cutting in and out of traffic, speeding, slamming on his brakes, starting abruptly, the car the voice of his discontent. More resigned than frightened, she put her hands over her eyes. If she was going to die in an auto crash, there was nothing to be gained by watching it happen.

  When she looked up they were two blocks past her apartment building; she let him go on.

  Finally he parked the car under a street lamp in front of a candy store (Sol’s Luncheonette) which was just closing for the night, Sol or one of his henchmen locking the newspaper stand in front. “Where do you live?” Peter muttered, staring ahead of him. “I think I passed it.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “I’ll turn around,” he said wearily. “You’ll have to direct me.”

  She watched him (bent and exhausted, he was almost ashen in the yellow light), touched by something about him: his almost comic despair, his lostness—something. A quirk of instinct, she reached down and took his hand, and pressed it to her mouth. The lights in the candy store went out. Peter turned abruptly, surprised as though a flash bulb had gone off in his face. It was too much to bear: there were tears in his eyes. Embarrassed for him, she wished herself out of the car, their relationship over, eradicated irrevocably from the nerve ends of memory. What was he crying about? she wondered. A sympathetic bystander, the sensations of his grief pricking her throat, she could almost believe that she was crying herself.

  “You’re crying,” he said, his face glistening. Who? She laughed, but it came out like a moan. Then he kissed her mouth, gently, barely touching her lips; surprised, aware of him, her bystander self looking on amused, she couldn’t stop crying. She couldn’t stop. “Who’s crying?” she said, fragments of Peter refracted through the prism of her tears, his broken face in flight like an enormous bird. She wanted him to leave her alone—the tears his fault—but when he moved away she missed him (felt it as a loss). She shivered, wiped her eyes with her scarf, remembering curiously the first time she made love with Stanley; the apartment they got to use, a terrible yellow-walled place smelling of after-shave lotion. The really bad part was that afterward, believing she ought to, she had been unable to feel remorse, unable to cry. Caught in the light of memory, she turned and was gratefully surprised that it was Peter, not Stanley, who was next to her.

  The street lamp seemed to be getting brighter, an electric sun, growing, breaking through the clouds; it blinded her. Even when she closed her eyes the light intruded; it had her number. Oh, Peter. Oh, Peter, you … what? She didn’t know. What was he thinking?

  “I can’t see you,” he said. “The light’s in my eyes.”

  She laughed, still crying.

  “It’s in my eyes too,” she said. “Why don’t you turn it off?”

  “All right,” he said, climbing out of the car, walking slowly along the side of the curb. Was he out of his mind? she wondered, as if it mattered. She saw him pick something up—crumpled paper or a large stone (it was difficult to tell) and then, turning—casually, it seemed—pitch it at the lamp. A bang like the popping of a champagne cork. And suddenly it was dark, fragments of glass shining on the sidewalk. He returned to the car, a shadow. Though she couldn’t see his face, she imagined he was smiling.

  “My hero,” she said with nervous irony, impressed and upset at the same time.

  He didn’t say anything—his expression impossible to determine in the dark—then he put his arm around her shoulders.

  “Peter, I really have to go up now,” she said. “My mother will think I’m being raped.”

  “Okay,” he said glumly.

  “Okay,” she mimicked.

  He grabbed her, nearly lifting her out of the seat, and held her fiercely against him. Crushed, about to cry out in pain, she decided not to. There would be plenty of time for retribution. Besides, in a crazy way, she was in love with him.

  | 3 |

  Had he actually rung the bell? It was hard to know, hard to distinguish between what he had done and his dream of himself doing it. He was about to ring again—for the first time?—when the door opened. For a moment he didn’t recognize her, her face distorted from having lived too long outside the knowledge of his recollection.

  “Yes?” she inquired. A dreamer, she guarded the half-opened entrance to the apartment, looked at him blankly, a crease in her forehead the only sign of interest.

  He waited for her to discover him. Still gaunt, she seemed, if somewhat changed, to have gotten younger; her hair, un-grayed, cut short in the fashion, the blue veins in her eyelids more pronounced. A lovely woman, she looked at him without recognition, without interest.

  “Lois,” he said softly, aware that in his ragged gray overcoat he must have looked like some sort of beggar.

  “Uhhh!” The sound, a half-sob, escaped involuntarily and she stood stunned with disbelief—remembering—the process painful, like awakening from an anesthetic. “Peter? My God, it’s Peter. I’m going out of my mind.” She turned to look behind her and he realized that there was someone else in the apartment, another man.

  “I’ll come back later,” he said.

  She looked behind her again. “No, come in. Please come in.” She took his hand, led him into the apartment; spare and immaculate, it reminded him curiously, for all its dissimilarities, of her parents’ place of fifteen years ago. “It’s Peter,” she announced to the room. “I can’t get over it. Peter. It’s been how many years? Twelve. Thirteen. I haven’t seen Peter in thirteen years, Oscar. Isn’t that amazing?” She continued to hold on to his hand.

  Oscar, standing, nodded, a thick-set man in his fifties with a magnificent mane of white hair, his manner cautious and professionally benevolent. Peter was introduced as a former husband, the first (of how many? he wondered); the other, a Dr. Patton, was merely a friend. They shook hands; Peter embarrassed that his nails were dirty. Lois took his coat from him, over his insistence that he wasn’t staying, and hung it in the closet. He felt exposed in his old suit; he hadn’t counted on company.

  He looked around him: the furniture modern, unobtrusive—the camouflage of studied taste. Lois, in an expensive black wool dress, was smiling at him affectionately, or was it the indulgence of pity? (He wished Patton would leave.) In recollection, he had always conceived of Lois as a kind of willful bohemian, a rebel against the triviality of fashion, and he wondered if the apartment’s tasteful respectability reflected some quality in her that he had failed to comprehend. Or was it the passage of time that made the difference? The failure of memory. His own historian, he wanted to know.

  “What kind of work do you do?” Patton asked—a break in the silence.

  Peter shrugged. “I’m writing a book,” he said.

  “That’s interesting,” Patton said. “What—”

  Lois interrupted. “What do you drink?” she asked, fluttering nervously, her hands like birds. “I’ve forgotten. I’m sorry.”

  They were drinking Manhattans at a bar on Eighth Avenue when he asked her to break off with Stanley. She had cried, and had made him promise that no matter what happened between them, he would never leave her. Never. He had to swear to it several times before she would believe him. Who had made a liar out of whom?

  “I’ll have whatever you’re drinking,” he said.<
br />
  “As a matter of fact,” Patton said solemnly, “at the moment we weren’t drinking anything.”

  Peter flushed. “Then don’t bother,” he said. “I don’t really want anything,” but Lois had already made the drink and was bringing it over.

  “You don’t want me to throw it out, do you?” she said, her smile patronizing him.

  He accepted the drink regretfully, in the interest of conversation; also, his toes were cold. When he had drained the glass—it was good Scotch, much better than he was used to—he felt less like an outsider and sat down, without being asked, on a chair next to the sofa. Patton, sitting stiff-backed in the center of the black sofa, seemed himself like a part of the furnishings, his white mane the final touch of grace. He couldn’t imagine the apartment without him.

  Lois sat between them. “Tell me,” she said to Peter, pulling her chair nearer to his, “what have you been doing? What have you been doing all these years?”

  “Not much,” he said, glancing at Patton. “Trying to keep track of things.” What else could he say? “And you?”