The Pavilion of Former Wives Read online

  Since almost all the vehicles in the lot are covered with some residue of the weather, it is hard to determine in the dark which car is theirs. In his hurry to get going, Leo, using the sleeve of his coat, clears off the front window of the wrong Forester.

  A Lexus SUV, pulling out from the row behind them, startles them with its horn. The driver, who could be the younger sister of the proprietress, rolls down a window and offers them a ride.

  In the chaos of the moment, Leo is tempted to accept, but Sara, who is clearing off another car, says, “Wait a second. I think I found ours.”

  They pile into the Forester Sara has cleared, though Leo is not at all sure it is the one that had brought them there.

  ******

  This time, Sara drives while Leo and Wizard sit next to each other in the back, a larger space between them than the one Leo observed between Sara and the puppy when he was at the wheel.

  Still he is pleased to be alone with his charge without other responsibilities, and he reaches out awkwardly to rub the puppy’s head. Closing his eyes, Wizard accepts Leo’s homage. When after a while Leo reclaims his hand, Wizard turns to look at him, the dog’s wise face making unspoken judgments, seeing through to the very bottom of the biographer.

  For an unguarded moment, Leo considers apologizing for his failings, promising to do his best to transcend his limitations in the future.

  At some point, at Leo’s request—the gauge registering empty— Sara pulls into a Mobil station to gas up and to find out where they might be in relation to where they are going. Apparently, they have been heading for the most part in the wrong direction and are farther away from home than ever. The source of their information, an overeager teenaged attendant, says he knows a shortcut and he draws them a not-quite-decipherable map on a coffee-stained napkin.

  “What do you want to do?” Sara asks Leo, showing him the makeshift map. “We could stop at the motel we just passed and start out fresh in the morning, or we could turn around and drive through the night.”

  Instinctively, he turns to Wizard, but the shaggy dog, head pressed against Leo’s leg, eyes mostly shut, offers merely the example of his silence.

  As Leo considers his options, he imagines them—Sara driving, himself in back with Wizard—moving on in whatever direction, letting the trip take them where it will, the hand-drawn map, the various maps just an excuse to pursue space and distance.

  At some point, Sara pulls the car off to the side of the road. “I’m getting tired,” she says, moving into the backseat, occupying Wizard’s other side. “Would you take over?”

  “Take over?” Leo has his arm around Wizard’s shoulder.

  “Yes, would you mind taking the next stretch?”

  “I don’t mind,” he says, imagining himself getting out of the car and taking his place behind the wheel while in fact not moving at all.

  “I’m glad you don’t mind,” she says, putting an arm around Wizard from the other side, grazing Leo’s fingers.

  The trip continues a while without calculable movement, the passengers in the backseat each with an arm around Wizard, hugging each other through the surrogate in their midst.

  THE READING

  The poet B travels by train to give a reading of his poems at an obscure liberal arts college in southern Pennsylvania. His lime-green Saab, which has been virtually the shell on his back, has come down with a case of transmission failure the morning of the trip. Worse news, it is his habit to believe, lies ahead. When his wife left him nineteen days ago to run off with a criminal lawyer, his life, which had been finely tuned for years, fell abruptly and perhaps irremediably into screeching disarray.

  The train ride is uneventful, a slideshow of undeveloped pictures. B uses the time to read and to muse on the disrepair of his life. When the train arrives at the college station twenty minutes late, no one is on the platform to meet him. What’s that all about? Already nightfall, the dark platform seems a deserted street in the middle of nowhere. Has he been lured here only to be abandoned in darkness? The tips of B’s fingers are chilled, almost numb from the cold. He paces the platform, his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, and waits. It is unrewarding activity, pacing and waiting, reminding him of the bad luck he is embarrassed to believe in and can’t seem to shake.

  He approaches the grizzled ticket-seller, who withholds speech as if there were no getting it back once given away. Still, if you ask the right questions, he has always believed, the information you’re after will work its way through the cracks. The college, he interpolates from the ticket-seller’s grunts and headshakes, is too far away to walk. There are no cabs available after six thirty. The station’s two public phones have been out of order for months. After a while another train arrives. B, who has nothing better to do, meets it as if he were meeting himself. Two people get off at the dark and deserted station. One is a woman he knows slightly, a poet he met two years ago at a writer’s conference and fell in love with at sight. He has not seen her since.

  When he introduces himself (she doesn’t remember having met him), the woman, Y, assumes B is a representative of the college there to meet her, a delusion she holds onto even after he explains that he too has been stood up. When he tells her of their mutual predicament, she reproaches him in a graceful way on his failures as a host. “You must learn to plan ahead,” she says. “Not everything we do works out as we intend it.” He acknowledges the wisdom of her remarks, suggests they walk toward the college with the hope of promoting a ride along the way. She will stay at the station, she says, and wait for them to come to her. It is her method in all things to let others come to her.

  What can B do but wait with her. “I can’t leave you,” he says, a remark which earns him a hit-and-run kiss on the cheek.

  “Never?” she asks.

  He wonders at that moment if there weren’t something fateful about them meeting this way, at the deserted college station. “It does stand to reason, doesn’t it?” B says. “That the college, having planned on our being there, will send someone to claim us.” The remark earns him a second kiss, this one passed from her fingers to his cheek.

  They sit for a while on one of the dark platform’s two backless stone benches, leaning into each other to keep the cold wind from taking residence between them. “I do remember you now,” she says. They talk about walking up and down to get warm or going inside the building to escape the wind. Ways of warming themselves is not their only subject. He is surprised when he puts his arm around her and she cuddles into his shoulder, as much surprised at his own gesture as at hers. His lost and barely remembered feelings for this woman revisit uninvited. Sensation returns to the tips of his fingers.

  When they stand up to go inside, she lets herself be kissed. She covers his mouth with her hand when he tries or seems about to try to explain himself. It is not as if he had anything to say that had not been heard.

  It is uncomfortable inside the small waiting room, airless and overbright, radiators wheezing like slumbering drunks. In the light, he discovers that she is not the person he thought she was, not the one he fell in love with at sight. This unlooked-for discovery leaves him emotionally bereft, as if his most passionate feelings had remained on the platform without him.

  He doesn’t tell her that she is the wrong one. They sit like strangers now, slightly apart, each reading a book of the other’s poems. The taste of her tongue, the weight of her head on his shoulder, are barely a memory. And this is the way they are, lost and found, when the awkwardly shy assistant professor who had been sent to pick them up makes his apologetic appearance. “Can you believe I couldn’t find the station?” he tells them.

  The assistant professor drives them toward the college in his cluttered brown and green station wagon, the seats and floor decorated with debris, old newspapers and magazines, loose Pampers, broken plastic toys, almost every surface occupied. They run out of gas before they arrive and their surrogate host, who is prepared for such emergencies, hurries off with a
one-gallon can under his arm, telling them not to worry, that he’s done this before.

  Moments after he leaves, a white, late-model oversized American car drives up alongside their beached whale. A white-haired man in formal clothes, a trustee perhaps, sticks his head out the window and asks them if they would like a ride to the college. B, who has no trust in the assistant professor, accepts immediately (though his door won’t open), but the woman in back (the one he’s fallen in and out of love with in the past hour) says the appropriate thing to do would be to wait for their driver to return. B argues his case, but the woman won’t be dissuaded from what she knows to be the right course. “I can’t leave her,” he explains to the trustee, who drives off without them.

  “When you say that,” she tells him when they’re alone again, “it makes me want to cry.”

  The assistant professor returns, feeds the empty tank, starts the car, and they drive to the college without further mishap. Except they arrive on campus ten minutes after the reading is scheduled and they find themselves locked out of the appointed building, Affect Hall. What’s with this college? Even if they get the building open (and the assistant professor has, with that intent in mind, gone off to find a key), where will an audience come from? There is no one else, no small clique of English majors, waiting to get in. At that point, B realizes that he has left his overnight bag at the train station. The only thing he can do, which is of little practical value, is imagine himself calling the station and asking the uncommunicative ticket-seller to put his bag in a safe place for him until he can manage his return.

  A security guard unlocks the building from inside. Momentarily, they are milling around in a small auditorium, the other poet, Y, holding his hand in a secretive way. An audience of five assembles itself. The poet asks his companion whether she’d like to go first or second. She has been drinking from a flask and is slightly befuddled. “What are my other choices?” she asks.

  The chairman of the English department, who wears black glasses, arrives to introduce the readers, or so B understands the man’s role when he takes the podium. The chairman, who is blind, reads his prepared text with his fingers. His written introduction seems for the first ten minutes or so elaborate and obscure. Neither B nor the faded beauty Y is mentioned by name. What’s it all about? The blind chairman goes on and on as if it were not an introduction at all but a paper elaborating a theory of language. “Language is the whim of silence,” says the speaker.

  Panic moves B to get up from his seat in the front row and look around the room. Are the others in the audience as astonished at the blind chairman’s performance as he is? “Sit down,” Y whispers at him.

  “Don’t you find this strange?” he asks her. She puts a finger over her lips, splitting a smile. When he sits down, she puts her lips over his to preserve his unhappy silence.

  When the introduction goes into its second hour most of the small audience leaves. Only B and Y and the chairman’s hearing-impaired wife continue their vigil.

  The assistant professor comes running down the aisle, waving his arms. What’s the problem? “There’s been a mix-up,” he says. “The Broadsnore Lecture is in here. You people are supposed to be in another room altogether.”

  Y insists on staying to the end of the lecture and B is conflicted on whether to leave or not. “Come with me,” he pleads.

  “It’s not right to walk out on him,” she says.

  B follows the assistant professor into a somewhat smaller room down the hall. There is an overflow crowd, as it turns out, waiting for him. They stamp their feet in welcome on his appearance at the podium. “You can’t believe what I went through to get here,” he says. That brings a laugh.

  It falls to the assistant professor to introduce him. “I don’t have to tell you how privileged we are to have this man with us today,” he starts out, an inappropriate remark that speaks to B’s unacknowledged secret self. The fulsome introduction continues. B is pictured as a defender of the defenseless, a man willing to take up causes so unpopular no one else in his right mind would dare touch them. What’s going on? The praise touches him almost to the point of tears. How does this bumptious assistant professor know so much about him, he wonders. It is as if he were introducing some figure of national prominence and not a relatively obscure poet known, if at all, for his uncompromising difficulty.

  And then his name is mentioned (though it is not exactly his name) to standing applause. He has been mistaken for someone else, a trial lawyer (and former basketball great) who has a predilection for representing only the blatantly guilty. At first B plans to deny that he is the famous lawyer they’ve been waiting for, but then he thinks, Well, maybe there’s a more graceful way to avoid the embarrassment of this foolish mistake. Besides, he has never had a crowd this large come to hear him. An ambiguous disclaimer might be sufficient. “I am not the man you think I am,” he says, which invites further applause. “Your support and affection have made this moment possible. There can be no justice without a constituency that acknowledges the possibility of justice.” Having run out of platitudes, he waits for inspiration.

  “Why do I do what I do?” he asks. The answer sits waiting for him. “Because if I don’t, no one else will.” The audience offers him a standing ovation. The back door opens and Y, looking tired and lost, slips into the room. “To give you a sense of who I am,” he says, “I want to read you some poems by a poet who I sometimes think speaks for me.” The audience clears its collective throat. Y alone applauds.

  B reads his poems for twenty minutes to mumbled confusion. The audience has a glazed look on its collective face when he stops. “Are there any questions?” he asks.

  An older woman in the third row has her hand up in a determined way and he nods in her direction. She turns to look behind her before speaking. “I don’t normally ask questions in public,” she says in a histrionic voice. “This is what I want to know. Would you defend someone who would kill his own mother?”

  “If I don’t, who will?” he says. “Next question.”

  “If you didn’t, another headline-seeker would,” a voice shouts out.

  B points to a young girl in the back. “In your opinion, what is the worst crime a person could commit?” she asks in a quivering voice. “And would you defend such a person?”

  B repeats the question for those of the audience who might not have heard it. “The worst crime, huh? The worst crime is the betrayal of self. The worst crime is the betrayal of love. The worst crime is any crime that has a victim. Such crimes are unforgivable and must be defended.”

  “Yeah,” the audience chants in one voice.

  A middle-aged man with alcoholic’s eyes asks, “Have you ever committed an unforgivable crime yourself?”

  “Yes,” says B.

  “Are you willing to say what that crime was?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Animals have rights too,” a woman in the fifth row says in an angry voice. “Do you think the killing of an innocent animal should be a capital offense? I want a yes or no answer.”

  “Yes or no,” says B, playing for the easy laugh. “Depends on how innocent the animal is.”

  The animal woman gets up and walks out of the room in an earnest huff. Her departure, or perhaps B’s answer, freezes the crowd. B waits patiently for another hand to rise. Y has the next question.

  “Were the poems you read,” she asks, “written by one of your unforgivable clients?”

  “We are all forgivable, I hope,” says B.

  The assistant professor ends the question period by stepping in front of B and inviting everyone to a reception in a lounge down stairs—wine without chemical additives and low-fat cheese—where the audience will be given opportunity to meet face to face with their celebrated guest.

  B, weary of the imposture, looks for a way out, takes Y’s hand and pulls her inside a stairwell away from the crowd.

  “What do you say we pursue justice elsewhere,” he says. He expects resistance an
d is almost disappointed when she says, “Where can we go?”

  “Let’s just wait here until the crowd disperses,” he says, realizing in the next moment that it is not Y whose hand he has taken but someone else, the woman who had been standing next to Y, the one concerned with meting out justice to animal slayers.

  Y finds him with the animal woman before B can excuse himself to leave. She calls him by his presumed name, tells him (eyeing the other woman) that his fans are waiting for him in the lounge.

  What fans are those? B makes a whirlwind tour of the lounge, pressing flesh like a politician, dispensing whatever wisdom the oiled tongue has to offer.

  After the reception there is another party, then dinner, then another party. Between the first and third party he has lost Y with whom he has again fallen in love. Anyway it is late and he is slightly drunk and very tired so he goes to the room they’ve assigned him in the Alumni House to take a nap or bed down for the night, however it goes.

  When he opens the door to the room he assumes is his, Room 2 according to the number on his key, he senses that something is amiss. Though the lock on the door answers to his key, there is an intruder in the bed sleeping soundlessly. It is the second thing he notices, the impostor in his bed; the first is the neatly folded pile of clothes on the chair across the room. B leaves silently, takes his outrage and exhaustion with him, sits on the stairs in the hall with his head in his hands. What can he do? He gets a brainstorm, decides to try the doors to the other rooms. There is a couple in Room 1 fucking in a dispirited way and B’s head is in and out before the couple, who turn to stare at him, have time to ask him what he wants. Room 3 resists his key. Room 4, his last hope for sanctuary, is unlocked and unoccupied. B slips into the room like a thief.

  He locks the door, pulls off his shoes without undoing the laces, and falls into bed—perhaps even falls asleep. Next thing he knows, someone is knocking on the door. Then he hears a key in the lock and the door click open. A man with a cane walks haltingly toward the bed. The figure takes off its clothes, piles them neatly on the floor, and slides under the covers next to him.