Editor’s Note: This is the third short story from Jonathan Baumbach’s forthcoming collection of short stories, “The Pavilion of Former Wives,” to be published by Dzanc in 2016. Look for additional stories from this collection in the Sunday Berkshire Edge. To read Baumbach’s previous story, ”The Pavilion of Former Wives,” click here.
For weeks they argued as if the terrifying unimaginable were at stake over something that had happened (or had not happened) 15 years back. Or perhaps 17 years back, as Genevieve continued to insist. The dispute concerned a trip they had taken to Seattle — that much was sometimes agreed on — in which they had both behaved badly, a trip that had very nearly ended in the dissolution of a long term marriage. It had come back to Josh in barely discernible disguise, provoked into memory by a startlingly vivid dream.
When he woke in a tattered rage, he replayed the dream in his head, not wanting to lose it as he had lost so much else in recent years, juggling its shapeless fragments in the imaginary air while waiting for Genevieve to open her eyes.
Finally, outmaneuvered by his own impatience, he woke her.
“I just had this disturbing dream…” he started.
She anticipated what came next. “And you want me to listen to it? Is that what this is about?”
“You were in the dream,” he said.
“Was I?”
* * *
He couldn’t remember when it started or even precisely how it started or if it had always been this way. He would have something in his hand or there was something in his sight he was thinking of picking up, something — whatever — he had plans for, and then the next moment it was nowhere. Once it had vanished, he could look everywhere for it, he could tear the house apart, and not find it. How furious it made him, furious both at himself and the disappeared object, his reading glasses say or a book he thought he might want to read, furious at being thwarted. Genevieve hated his rages, but what else could he do, it was the only revenge powerlessness allowed.
Shortly after that, or perhaps concurrently, was Josh’s burgeoning failure to come up with words (sometimes names) that had previously been available to him. It was his habit to do the Times crossword puzzle every night before going to sleep. His skill, which he secretly prided himself on, began to fail him, answers that were on the edge of memory denying him access. And more than once, perhaps even several times he lost the names of people he knew perfectly well when running into them unexpectedly. If he worked at it, which he did — it was almost all he did — he was certain he could defeat the problem.
* * *
“I’ll listen to your dream after I have my coffee,” she said.
He followed her into the kitchen impatiently, rehearsing the opening of the dream in his head. They were riding in a rented car, an Audi wagon, going to a party at an old, sometime friend’s house.
“I have a feeling I know how this is going to end up,” she said, sipping her coffee.
“I was anxious in the dream,” he said, “because the host was someone you had a one night stand with in Seattle. I wanted to turn back, though the trip had its own momentum.”
“I never had a one night stand with anyone in Seattle, for God’s sake” she said. “Who did you have in mind?”
“The trip seemed to go on forever, though it was supposed to be 3 hours at most. Maybe we should go back, I said. It’ll be longer going back, you said. Let’s just get there and get it over with.
“Then suddenly the house appeared — it was as if it were in the middle of the road — and we had to pull over to the side not to run into it. Pulling over, we slid into a ditch and you said you knew this would happen. I promised you I would find a way out, but you seemed skeptical. Anyway we got out of the car and went into the house without knocking or ringing the bell. We were obviously very late because the party seemed in its last stages, couples lying on the floor, drunk or asleep, a few having sex in what seemed like slow motion. The hostess appeared — the man’s wife — and she said to make ourselves at home, but that she was sorry to say that all the good wine had already been consumed. I had brought a bottle but it was still in the car and I excused myself to go out and retrieve it.
“Don’t leave me, you whispered, but I went out anyway, stopping at the door for a moment to embrace the hostess, whose name I had forgotten.
“And then I was in the car, looking under the seat for the bottle of good wine I had brought. I came up with a dusty bottle of Pinot Blanc I had never seen before — it was not the bottle I remember taking — and handed it to the hostess who was on the floor of the car on her knees next to me. I know this wine, she said to me. It was my absolute favorite before I quit drinking and carousing altogether. I don’t know how to thank you. Will a long lingering kiss do the trick? I didn’t think an answer was appropriate. Then we got out of the car and started back to the house. She took me around the side where there was a picture window and we looked into the master bedroom together, her small breasts pressing against my back. There was a couple on the bed, fooling around, his head under her skirt and she said, ‘That’s my husband and your wife.’ It wasodd because I didn’t recognize you at first. ‘What do you want to do about it?’ she asked me.
* * *
“Is that it?” Genevieve asked.
“There was more, but the rest comes and goes. The point is, it was just like that time at the party in Seattle where the hostess and I found you in the upstairs guest room with her husband. He had been a high school sweetheart or something of the sort.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “That never happened. When is this supposed to have happened?”
“The trip, don’t you remember that terrible trip we took — we had picked up your mother’s car in Annapolis — I don’t remember what it was doing there — and we were delivering it to them in Seattle. It was 15 years ago. I never wanted to go. We fought over everything. Don’t you remember?”
“I don’t remember because it never happened. Josh, we haven’t been to Seattle together in 17 years.”
“It could have been 17 years ago, but it doesn’t seem as if that much time has passed. You asked my forgiveness, don’t you remember, and you said it would never happen again.”
Genevieve laughed. “You’re out of your mind. …I didn’t mean that the way it came out.. If anything, you’re conflating several different events. Yes?”
“No,” he said. “I’m right about this.”
She left the kitchen and, after deciding not to, he followed her up the stairs. When he reached her — she was in her study sitting at her computer — he couldn’t remember what he wanted to say
* * *
“I can’t live with your suspicions,” she told him the next day or the day after that.
“This was 15 years ago,” he said.
“You’re the most ungenerous man I’ve ever known,” she said. “It didn’ even happen.”
He waited until she was sitting at the table to make the point he had been thinking about much of the previous night. He had lost it temporarily but now it was at memory’s fingertips. “If it never happened, why does it disturb you if I mention it.”
She had no answer and then she did. “How would you like it,” she said, “if I constantly reminded you of the time 12 years ago that you hit me.”
“I never,” he said, aggrieved. “I don’t remember ever hitting you.”
“That doesn’t mean it never happened,” she said, “does it? You have an awful temper and you know it.
* * *
He remembered the car, an oversized Chevrolet that had a habit of stalling at red lights. And so he brought it up to her when they talked again several hours later, reminded her of the car’s various unnerving tics.
“My mother never drove a Chevrolet,” she said.
“If it wasn’t a Chevrolet,” he said, “what was the car we drove across country? It was a blue and white Chevrolet.”
“That was a different time,” she said. “Anyway I never went to high school in Seattle.”
It was possible that the boy he had caught her with in Seattle resembled her high school sweetheart. The phone interrupted this thought and he took the occasion to answer it. It was someone from their bank, offering to sell him some pointless new service no one in his right mind could possibly want. It was presented to him as a favor they owed him for being such a good customer. Even after he said no thank you, the voice at the other end continued her rehearsed spiel. “Damn it,” he said. “When I say no I mean no.”
“When you say no, you often change your mind afterward,” she said.
This was Genevieve not the woman on the phone whom he had temporarily shut out of his life five minutes earlier.
When he took Magoo, their Airedale, out for his evening walk, he tried to conjure up Genevieve’s mother’s errant Chevrolet. No details answered his quest. Maybe it wasn’t a Chevrolet, though unless he had lost his mind altogether there had been a car they had picked up in Annapolis and driven to Seattle.
* * *
The next time Josh approached her to make some debater’s point, she could no longer remember the particulars of their long running argument. He caught her at the refrigerator door, struggling against residual vagueness, wondering what urgency had brought her there. “Are you ready to admit that I was right,” she said.
“I didn’t want to make the trip to Seattle,” he said, “because I never enjoyed myself in your mother’s house.”
She peered into the refrigerator, hoping that something in the picture would remind her that she had come on its errand.
“My mother always spoke highly of you,” she said. “That was until she stopped remembering who you were. She actually encouraged me to marry you, though of course I never did what she wanted and she knew that like the back of her hand.”
“It was your mother,” he said, “who invited that guy your high school sweetheart to lunch with us. He was in Seattle on some business trip or he had just moved there and he phoned your mother to find out where you were.”
She took a container of milk from the refrigerator, which seemed as good a choice as any. It might have been that she was planning to make a pot of coffee. “You’re saying he, whoever, called my mother.”
“Yes,” he said, “and she invited him over.”
“She invited him to the house in Seattle? That’s an odd thing for her to do. Where was I?”
“You were there,” he said angrily. “You were already there.”
“Was I? And where were you?”
“On the outside looking in.”
* * *
It had been dark for almost two hours and they were still driving around looking for an acceptable place to stop for the night. Genevieve was in one of her moods. None of the motels they passed in the seemingly endless sprawl of this one-street small town impeding their progress appealed to her. “You make the choice, Josh,” she said.
“What about this one?” he said. They were approaching a row of nondescript cabins. According to the flickering sign, the place was called Dew Drop Inn.
“Oh Josh,” she said, “that’s so depressing. We’ve passed by places that were nicer than this.”
He pulled into the parking space next to the office. “I’m not staying here,” she muttered.
He went into the brightly lit office without her and rented 6A with his American Express card, though the proprietor warned that a drunk trucker tended to come by around 3 AM and was likely to knock on the door, insisting the place was his. “All you have to do,” the woman said, “is to keep your door locked and pay no attention to him. After a while, he gets discouraged. You’ll be making a big mistake if you answer the door.”
When he returned to the car, already regretting his decision to pay for the room, Genevieve was a notable absence. He lounged in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, dozing, waiting with willed indifference for her return, assuming nothing, assuming she had gone off looking for a bathroom or had decided to leave him forever. When he could no longer sit still, he evacuated the car to look for her. Having no idea where to look, he headed toward the diner they had passed a block or so back, his best guess, hurrying, speed-walking, breathing hard, running.
He was so intent on getting there, he nearly ran over her in the dark, as she came slowly toward him. “Is that you, Josh?” she said. “I got us some coffee.”
“Damn you,” he said.
* * *
She woke up the next morning with something on her mind that concerned Joshua. She woke up remembering how fond she was of him which was, she suspected, an abrupt change in the weather. For months, perhaps years, she had been nursing the hope that he would silently disappear. As soon as she got into her forest green terry cloth bathrobe, which he had given her last Christmas (there were some things she didn’t forget), she intended to go downstairs — she heard someone banging around in the kitchen — and tell whoever it was (who else could it be?) about her discovery. A detour to the bathroom to pee and to brush her teeth interceded. By the time Genevieve reached the kitchen she could still remember she had something she wanted to tell Joshua, but not what it was.
“I made coffee,” he said when she approached,” but I finished most of it.”
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said.
He took a coffee mug from the cupboard for her, filling it almost halfway with what remained of the pot he had brewed. He was embarrassed to tell her that there was no longer any milk.
She improvised her news. “I need to know,” she said, “why you leave fingerprints on the bathroom towels.”
“So we’ll have a subject for conversation,” he said, “other than Seattle which you won’t discuss.”
“Do you expect the fingerprints to go on forever?” she asked.
“Not forever,” he said. “If he wasn’t your high school sweetheart, who was the man in the bedroom with you in Seattle?”
She left the room abruptly, having no interest in the turn the conversation had taken, but then returned momentarily with an appropriate response. “Whoever he was, he didn’t leave fingerprints on clean towels,” she said.
“If he was such a paragon, why didn’t you run off with him when you had the chance?”
She was on to him now. “You brought him around, didn’t you, so you would have an excuse to get rid of me. That’s so like you.”
“It was your mother not me who bought him into the house.”
“So you say,” she said, “but it could have been you who told mother to invite him over. …This happened where?”
“It was in Seattle.”
“No way.”
“I know it was Seattle. That was where your mother was living at the time.”
“I’ll tell you why you’re wrong,” she said. “My mother never would have allowed it, never in a million years. You know what I think. I think the person in the bedroom with me was you.”
* * *
He left an unfinished sentence on his computer screen to ask Genevieve if she would like to go for a walk.
“Do I like taking walks?” she asked.
He couldn’t remember the last time they had walked together, but he wouldn’t have asked if there was no chance that she would accept.
Rejection had never been high on his list of priorities. “It’s your call,” he said.
“My call?” she said “Really my call? I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk with you if you promise not to tell me your dream. Let’s not walk too far, all right?” She took his arm then gave it back and disappeared to find her coat. Her searches always took longer than anticipated. She remembered that she hated to feel cold while whoever she was with seemed not to mind.
When she returned she asked him if he knew why she had her coat on.
“We were going to go for a walk if I made a certain promise,” he said.
“Did you really think I didn’t know we were going for a walk,” she said. “I knew we were going to go for a walk. What was this promise you were going to make?”
“I’m not making any promises,” he said.
“You make too many promises as it is,” she said, which offended him momentarily and then amused him no end. It seemed to him the wittiest thing she had said to him in ages.
His extended amusement, which bent him over, disconcerted her. She wondered if she had meant what she said, whatever it was, as a joke all along. She laughed in echo not wanting to seem out of it.
He was still smiling at her remark as they started their walk hand in hand in the general direction of their local park.
“How much further do we have to go?” she asked.
“We haven’t gone anywhere, sweetheart,” he said. “Do you want to go back. We’ll go back if you want to go back.”
I don’t want to do anything that makes you angry,” she said, “though everything I do makes you angry.”
“Let’s go back,” he said, taking back his hand.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Do you even know the way back? You’re always getting us lost. You know that’s true.”
“Of course I know the way,” he said, looking over his shoulder to see] if their house was still in the distance behind them.. “And when did I ever get you lost.”
A much younger couple with a baby in a stroller excused themselves to edge their way by. “Do you know where the park is?” Genevieve asked the woman.
“It’s where we’re going,” the woman said. “You can follow us.”
Genevieve admired the baby and thanked the couple.
“I know where the park is,” Josh said when they were alone. “You didn’t have to ask anyone.”
After awhile they came to the corner of their extended block and Josh saw or thought he saw the park in the distance, the couple with the stroller framed in the entrance, which confirmed him in his view of himself as someone in charge of his own life.. He had a reputation even in better days for having an unreliable sense of direction. It was strictly the judgment of others. In so far as he could remember, he had always gotten where he was going.
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Genevieve\ asked.
“We’re just taking a walk,” he said.
“I suppose that’s all right,” she said.
Eventually, the park moved toward them in its leisurely pace. It was late afternoon and the trees seemed back-lit, suffused with light.
“Do I like the park?” she asked.
He didn’t want to lie to her, though God knows there had been lies between them before. “Almost everyone likes the park,” he said.
“I was here as a child,” she said. “Do you remember? The park was larger then.”
He was thinking it was time to turn back, but he let the thought, with its disquieting urgencies, dissolve They were getting along so well, he didn’t want to disturb the rhythm that had brought them to this place.
They took the center path but after awhile it seemed more rewarding to take a right turn on a narrower, more cunning road, dotted at uncertain intervals with stone benches.
“Is this my warmest coat?” she asked him.
He took his coat off and put it around her shoulders. “Would you like to sit for a while?”
“If you do,” she said. “I always ruin things for you.”
“Isn’t that the nature of marriage,” he said.
They were between benches and he chose for their resting place the one they had already passed, shortening if not by much the distance necessary for return. As her bottom made acquaintance with the bench, she gave up a sigh, leaning into Josh to exclude the darkness. “I know what you’re saying,” she said. “You think I’m like my mother. It so happens I remember that we met in a park very much like this one. I was with another boy at the time, someone from my class.”
He continued to worry that they would not find their way back in the dark but her story, which he had never heard before, fascinated him. He was desperate to hear how it turned out and he would sit there with her, he decided, shoulder to shoulder, as the temperature fell and the shadowy light] went its vagrant way, to the bitter end.
