A Man to Conjure With Read online

  “Herbie …” Peter leaped up to follow, hesitated, picked up the ten and turned, which proved to be a mistake; Gloria was bearing down on him. Run, he told himself, run for your life, his spirit following Herbie out the back door, the rest of him standing still. The wall clock showed five to one. Even if he left immediately, and ran the whole distance back, he would be a few minutes late. Run. He turned to look again, the vanity of knowing. Smiling grimly, she waved; trapped, he waited. Why not? Though anxious to get back to work for Cappello’s sake (for his job’s sake), he was glad to see Gloria again—a twinge of lust under the collar.

  The eloquence of her discontent! Dressed to kill, her breasts prodding her tight orange coat like concealed weapons, she moved irresistibly in a straight line, waiters bending out of her way like trampled flowers. Peter waited as though in front of a tank, resolute, fascinated, scared to death. And Cappello was waiting for him, his face on the wall the face of a clock.

  “So he’s left you to pay the check,” she said, looking through him.

  He shrugged. “I’d like to talk to you, Gloria, but I have to get back to work.”

  “Good-bye,” she barked, turning her back, her hair—surprise—a new season. Winter-black. He liked it better before: mouse-brown, but her own.

  Outside the restaurant, lingering, he wondered out loud—an afterthought—if Gloria had had lunch.

  Lunch? She had only contempt for lunch. Outraged, she told him about Herbie and Doreen sneaking out of the apartment behind her back, taking all their stuff, leaving her there alone with the Goodwill furniture, for the crows.

  Peter listened, nodded, unable to care. In a hurry to get away, he babbled his concern, ashamed of not caring.

  She walked along with him, spilling out her grievances, puffing fiercely on a cigarette, a sullen witch.

  They passed Cardinal Ties, his reflection on sale, Gloria among the dust of last year’s faded styles.

  “This is it,” he said. “I’d better go up before they fire me. See ya.” He waved good-bye.

  She buzzed on, oblivious. He stayed, not listening; as she raged, grievance begetting grievance, her voice got louder. “It’ll be all right,” he consoled her. She kept on. He suffered the notice—the superior smiles—of passers-by, his face protesting his innocence as if anyone cared. When he looked at his watch, usually five minutes slow, he saw that he was a half-hour late.

  “I really hate to be such a bother,” she was saying, tapping her foot, “but you’re his brother, you know what he’s like. All I want is what’s coming to me, which is to be treated like a person, a human being.”

  Peter glanced at his watch again, trying to hold time back with his will, the minutes spilling away as she talked. She was holding his arm, the raven hair a wig of grief.

  It was too late to go to work: they went to Herbie’s (now Gloria’s) place to have a drink, to continue their talk without the pressure of interruption.

  Uninterrupted—“September Song” on the phonograph, a few beers under the belt—there was nothing to talk about; they spent the afternoon in consultation on a lopsided, broken-springed double bed, a dying moth their audience. Her love a kind of vengeance, his a matter of course. Small pleasure, small regret! What had he expected? He remembered nostalgically the vague half-smile of his dream, but even though he searched, he didn’t see it again. It was a loss, that dour smile—that cracked, open bud. If he missed anything—and how could he know at the time?—he missed that.

  When he thought it time to go, he climbed off the bed to find his pants. Gloria asleep.

  “You can stay awhile,” she crooned from a corner of the bed, her eyes still closed, her tangled raven hair glistening dully like fresh paint.

  “I have to go,” Peter said, having trouble finding the leg holes in his pants. The small squarish room, quaint with flowered wallpaper and peeling basket chairs, had the sweet, rubbery smell of rotting fruit.

  “You don’t have to go,” she said in her movie-siren voice, “if you don’t want to go.” She sprawled across the bed, lazy and heavy—a big cat playing possum in the sun, the inner nerves tense, ready for the kill.

  Pants and shirt on, he searched under the bed for his socks and shoes among worms of dust, entrails of old magazines. “I really have to get home,” he said, recalling Lois in a shock of guilt. “My wife will—”

  “What wife? You told me … What do you mean? … You said you were split up.” She sat up, sullen, a benighted raven, deceived again.

  “She came home yesterday,” he said apologetically.

  “Good for her. Let me be the first to tell you: you’re no great catch, lover.”

  “I guess not.”

  She glared balefully, a sphinx of accusation; he hesitated, straightened his tie, impaled by the wrath of her grief.

  “Well,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. “See ya.”

  “If you’re going,” she said, looking at her fingernails, “go. Buzz off.”

  He moved a few inches. “I’m sorry,” he said stupidly. “If you need any money …”

  “Get lost, will you?” She turned her head fiercely, shaking her inky hair—a contemptuous porcupine, full of injured dignity.

  “If you want to know something, lover,” she whispered as though they were love words, “you’re no match for your big brother.” She forced a laugh. “Do you know what you are?”

  Though it was a question that interested him, he decided not to wait to find out. Dragging his raincoat, he rushed out the door and down the four flights of stairs like a man in need of air, into the dusk-glowing rush-hour streets. As he fled, he thought he heard her saying, Stay, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean what I said, stay, but he couldn’t be sure; there were echoes in the hall, other voices.

  He rode home on the subway, cramped against the door, sweating his guilt, his face in the window’s mirror smeared with regret. Why had he done it? For Herbie, he answered himself. How could he deny his own flesh?

  | 4 |

  Peter never went back to the Bureau of Economic Research. What for? He wrote a letter explaining his absence, tore it up, wrote another, sent nothing. Ashamed, guilty at his pleasure in not working, he left the house every morning in suit and tie (his uniform of responsibility) as though he had a job—which was almost the truth, a temporary lie. Provided for, or so she thought, Lois went to school while Peter earned their living, or so he pretended. He meant to tell her—a lie was more pain than he could bear—planned the telling of it so often that he thought he had. It was his own joke; he hadn’t, couldn’t—having kept it from her—until he found a job to replace the one he didn’t have. Only a matter of time. Lois found out without being told; in its dull way one of the worst shocks of her life. If she couldn’t trust Peter, who had no guile, who in the world could she trust? It was then that she decided not to have the child. She kept her decision, her knowledge, secret from Peter, who had forfeited his right to her confidence. In justice to herself—a sense of balance her life’s work—she would pay him back for his deceit. A housewife and a student, she kept accounts.

  Looking for a job is part-time work, more or less, though depleting in other ways, tiring in all ways. Peter bought the Times each morning, circled the half-dozen or so want ads that seemed possible for him—disheartening possibilities—then tracked them down, a man of prospects. At about eleven he was through, unhired, a free man, the day ahead of him. His routine was to read the paper in the park for a start, writing notes to himself in the margins, until he got too cold and had to walk around to warm himself. So he walked around, a daydreamer, the past and future of the world like the ends of an unbuilt bridge in his dreams. The February wind, nervous and obscene, heckled him, clawed at his genitals. Unable, unwilling to afford lunch, he had coffee with lots of cream and sugar to keep the machinery going. Also, an occasional doughnut. Nature was provident: in his wanderings he found an Automat in which one of the apple-pie windows didn’t lock, but refilled itself in good faith automatically (the
magic of automation: the broken fingers are out of view). Five pies were all he could take in one sitting; he came back later in the afternoon for a snack. “I’ve had my eye on you,” a flower-hatted old lady said, standing over him as he forced down the pie. “You’re not honest.” She pointed her umbrella at him to let him know that she was armed, and sat down at a neighboring table, keeping him under surveillance. He pretended to ignore her, then fled, reminded as he ran of his days of running from the police as a kid. He thought he heard her yell something after him—thief, you— but he didn’t look back.

  The next day he phoned Gloria to get Herbie’s new address, hoping, nervous about calling, that she was no longer angry at him. Herbie answered. He was home alone, he said, Gloria out working for a change, no mention of Doreen at all, no mention of Peter’s favor to him. Some favor!

  “Why don’t you come over?” Herbie said. “I’m not doing anything this morning; it‘ll be a chance for us to have a talk. Huh?”

  “I have to look for a job,” Peter told him—an alibi of conscience.

  “Who’re you kidding?” he said. “You want a job? I’ll get you a job. Come on over. We’ll talk about it.”

  “All right,” Peter said, easier to go than to argue, “but I can’t stay long. For other reasons, it’s important …”

  “Hey, how’s your wife? She treating you okay? You know what the trouble is—it’s the reason you’ve always screwed up—you’re afraid to lose her and you let her know it, so she takes advantage. If you want my advice …”

  “I’ll be right over,” he said.

  Herbie was the same: he dispensed wisdom, a five-dollar loan, and promised Peter that in a couple of days he would have a job for him. “Have I ever lied to you, kid?” he said.

  “Once or twice,” Peter admitted.

  “Never,” Herbie insisted, his honor at stake. “When?”

  Peter was sorry he had mentioned it.

  “You can’t think of a time, can you?” Herbie said. “Can you?”

  Peter shrugged.

  “Don’t make accusations you can’t back up,” he grumbled.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter said, amused.

  “One of these days,” Herbie said, stretched out on the Goodwill couch, his clasped hands a pillow for his head, “I’m going to make it. I’m really going to make it.”

  “How are you going to do that?” Peter wanted to know. Herbie’s dealings, though apparently illegal (maybe not), seemed to pay less for greater expenditure of hope and energy than most “honest” work.

  “When it happens, you’ll find out,” was Herbie’s answer, his huge stocking feet hanging over the arm of the sofa, a cavernous rip at the summit of the big toe. When the doorbell rang, Herbie, who had seemed incapable of motion, leaped to his feet, Peter following his example. “Don’t be so jumpy,” he said to Peter, putting on his shoes, tearing one of the laces. “That’s your problem—you’re jumpy.”

  Peter put on his coat, ready to leave, ready to confront Gloria. Herbie admitted a small, nattily dressed man with a large ratlike head. “Come on in, Ira,” he said warmly. “Make yourself at home. My brother’s just leaving.”

  “Your brother?” Ira looked him over, nodded, sniffed the air distastefully, his eyes impartial assassins. “He’s got an honest face,” he said softly, his mouth opening only slightly at the corner. “Herbie, never trust a man with an honest face.”

  Herbie laughed enthusiastically, his eyes unamused. Peter left. It struck him as he walked across town, traveled west from the Lower East Side to the Fifth Avenue Cafeteria for a real lunch for a change—a knockwurst sandwich and a beer, coffee and cheese cake—that he hadn’t told Herbie about the business with Gloria, which was probably just as well, though as a matter of course it ruined his appetite.

  Lois had just finished washing her hair, and was about to start in on her homework when Herbie called.

  “Let me speak to your husband,” he said in his usual peremptory manner, not bothering to identify himself. She knew who it was.

  “Peter’s not in,” she said.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s at work. Where do you think he is?”

  “How should I know? Look, Laura—this is Herbie, Peter’s brother. Will you tell him when he gets in that I’ve got a job for him, and if he wants it, to call me back. Even if he doesn’t want it. Okay?”

  “Peter’s got a job,” she said, irritated at Herbie’s officiousness.

  “Is that right? That’s not what he tells me. Okay. Just give him my message, please, will you? How are you, Lila? What’s new? We’ll have to get together one of these days and have a brother-to-sister talk. What do you say?” She had the odd feeling that Herbie was winking at her on the other end. The hell with him, she thought afterward, looking at herself in the mirror, combing her hair; her face was breaking out—the damn pregnancy!—she was getting uglier by the minute. She combed her hair, the act a comfort in itself, washed her face with soap, then studied herself in the mirror again. Her skin seemed to be turning yellow. How any man could bear to look at her—her face, once beautiful, a ruin of itself—was more than she could comprehend. (Her breasts were beginning to swell; that, at least, was an improvement.)

  Unable to do anything else, made lonely by betrayal, she called home.

  “Mildred,” she said, when her mother answered, “I just discovered that Peter’s been lying to me.” She picked at a stain on her brown skirt.

  A sigh on the other end. “I don’t want you to say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Let’s not go into that again.”

  “You know any time you feel you’ve had enough, your father will come right over there and bring you home. I don’t want to interfere, Lois, but any man who would say what he said to your mother …”

  “Please!”

  “All right. Not another word about it, though I think you’re crazy for putting up with him. Lois, what kind of lies has he been telling you? Tell me the truth. Is he in trouble with the police?”

  Her mother was too much. Lois smiled, the image of her amusement in the mirror of her mind, made a comic face for Peter’s sake as though he were there in the kitchen to appreciate the joke. “He pretends to go to work every morning,” she said, glad of someone to complain to, “but according to his brother he doesn’t have a job. Where can he possibly go?”

  “Is that all? I expected something worse.” Her mother sounded disappointed. “You know if you need any money, Lois, Dad and I will give it to you. We won’t let you starve.”

  It was beginning to rain, the odor of damp wool permeating the kitchen. “It’s not only that,” Lois said, called on to justify her grief. “There are other complications.”

  “Like what? Tell me.”

  I’m having a baby that will kill me, that is eating up my insides. For a moment she was going to tell her mother, in need of sympathy, but then—a complicated decision—she decided not to. “Like I still think I’m in love with Stanley,” she said.

  “Oh!”

  “Mildred, Peter will be home soon. I’d better get some dinner on the stove. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Stanley was over yesterday to get some things he left over here.” Mildred lowered her voice as though it were a secret. “He’d take you back in a minute, Lois. I know what I’m saying.”

  “Okay. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. So long, Mildred.”

  “Good-bye. And another thing, don’t go out if you still have a cold. Your voice is very hoarse. And don’t tell me that it isn’t, because I can hear that it is. Remember to call.” Lois hung up.

  When Peter came home Lois embraced him, behaved as if nothing was wrong. It made him suspicious, though he pretended to be pleased—a nervous pleasure in willful pretense. Sensitive to the tremors of distrust, neither said much during dinner, chary of what was unsaid.

  “Is the meat loaf too rare for you?” Lois asked, reverent of the silence, watchful.

  “Good,” Peter mumbled, his
mouth full.

  “Your brother called,” she said casually, as if it was the next thing to come to mind, watching him like a spy. Peter flinched but didn’t know it, went on eating.

  “What did he want?” He took a drink of water, coughed, another drink, choking.

  Lois turned her head, a pang of satisfaction, a bitter victory.

  “He didn’t tell me. He wants you to call him back.”

  “You don’t have any idea why he called?”

  Her chin poised on her palm, she played at being thoughtful, thought of other things. “No idea,” she said.

  He went on eating. “I like your hair that way,” he said, enjoying his meal again.

  She had a moment of hating him. “It’s not any way,” she said, withholding her irritation. “I just washed it, it’s just hanging straight.”

  “I like it that way,” he said.

  She smiled wanly. He reached across the table for her hand; it wasn’t there.

  After dinner: Peter was reading a book, was trying to read, while Lois knocked about in the kitchen, clearing up, dropping an occasional dish—the disconcerting music of her mood.

  He was out of touch. The tension buzzing at the back of his ears his only sense of things, his knowledge of the world. He wondered, worried—looking for explanations—if Lois had found out about Gloria. Whether she knew or not, he regretted it, that long day in bed, wished it undone; yet thinking about it, succeeded in recalling only the profits of pleasure, the languor, the act of love. He got up, paced the room, tweaked by shame and desire, the ghosts of unrest.