The Other Mr. Bax (13 page)

Beth was in the kitchen preparing dinner; Molly, in the shower. Roland retrieved the book Joyce had sent him, and settled into a plump chair near the fireplace in the family room. The dull, muffled thump of a car door came from outside. A few moments later, his brother entered the room.

“Another day, another dollar,” he said.

“You got a raise?” Beth stood before the stove, sprinkling spices over a steamy skillet.

Brian shook his head. “Just a figure of speech, honey.”

Roland tipped his head over the back of the chair. “Whaddaya think?” He pinched the fabric below the collar of his shirt, pulling it away from his chest. “Joyce sent me a couple boxes of clothes… and this book.” He dropped a finger onto the page he was reading, to hold his place.

“Dinner’s just about ready,” Beth called, from the kitchen.

After dinner, Roland took the phone into his room and closed the door. He opened the book, Joyce had sent, to where he’d placed the photo, and propped it up on the nightstand next to where he sat. He tapped in her number and brought the phone to his ear. The ring tone from the other end repeated several times before a machine finally picked up—“You’ve reached Joyce and Roland Bax…” At first he didn’t realize the voice was his. “We are not at home at—”

“Hello?” Joyce interrupted, sounding winded.

“Joyce?” He too was short of breath, though he had done nothing physical to account for it.

“Roland?”

“Hi, I uh… I just called to thank you. I wanted to thank you for the clothes and the book. They’re perfect. Thank you.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “That was very thoughtful of you.”

He had said the one thing he’d planned on saying. There was more he wanted to say, but didn’t want to risk boring her with melancholic reminiscing or clumsy hypotheses that sound like excuses and apologies. He waited for a reply, each second longer than the last, each second giving him time to ponder the possible meanings hidden within the bloated silence. “Well, I just wanted to say thank you.” He waited, hoping she’d step in and relieve him with “you’re welcome,” or “goodbye,” or anything. “That’s all,” he said. “I should go.” The moment felt ridiculous and familiar at the same time.

“Roland… I’m sorry. I…” She choked. “I’m glad you called. I just…” He could hear her breathing. “It’s hard for me. I’m not usually so—”

“I know. I mean… Actually, I was hoping we could talk.”

“Oh God, I’ve been wanting nothing more than to talk with you.”

The tremor in her voice tugged at his empathy—a mix of loss, confusion, and fear, which was always there, in check beneath the surface. He searched for one of a thousand questions about her, which had accumulated in the days since the hospital. “The photograph… it’s—”

“I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

“Once I’d left the post office I realized how weird that was… the photo. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

Roland glanced at the photo. “No… Well—”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“A little, maybe. I mean… but, anyway…”

“I guess I... you know… I miss you.” She hesitated, started to say something more, then stopped. They both spoke at the same instant. “I—”

He waited.

“But it
is
kind of weird.”

“I know.” He again looked at the photo, and tried to picture her at the other end of the phone, sitting on the edge of her bed, listening to every word he said—analyzing and forming opinions.

“You remember Selma? The school playground?” she said.

He picked up the photograph—“Yeah, I do”—imagined being there on the boat with her, this same conversation taking place.

“Tell me something, anything… anything you remember. You don’t mind, do you?”

For as far back as he could remember, Roland had carried an ambiguous desire to pick up where one of their earlier conversations had left off. He allowed his shoulders to relax, then searched his mind for a glimpse of that distant past, the playground, the swings, Joyce Rubens— thirty-seven years ago—such craziness. It was mostly just loose fabrications that he had to draw upon. But then he found a detail he believed was possibly real—one she might remember.

“There was this dress you wore… white, cut square below the neck, with bands of embroidery around the sleeves and hem. I remember it had geometric patterns in the trim. I’d always had a thing for patterns. Do you remember it? A Dutch style, I guess. Traditional Dutch. Maybe German. And I may’ve created that association. I recall you saying you were born in Germany. Anyway, it was very different from what the other girls were wearing.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said. “I can’t really remember the clothes I wore back then. But I remember something you wore. Is that funny? I mean, that we’re remembering clothes?”

“Yeah, I don’t usually pay attention to clothes,” he said.

“Do you remember the red vest? You wore it over a white shirt… and a bowtie?”

“A bowtie?”

“A red bowtie and vest.” She chuckled.

“My god, I
do
remember. Where’d I get that vest?”

“Your mom got it for you for Christmas. You’d asked her for it.”

A smile pushed the corners of his lips up. No one could have known that, except maybe Joyce Rubens. “A clip-on bowtie.” He laughed—the first time he’d laughed since the accident.

“Yeah… I remember you. And that girl in the white dress was me.”

He recalled standing near her bus after school, the day she’d failed to join him at the swings. He’d watched all the kids file on, but not Joyce. He’d never see her again. “The boy with the red bowtie.”

“The man in the photo… that’s you too,” she said.

Roland glanced down at the photo. “He looks happy, like a lucky man who knows it.” The words felt thin—a watered down cliché for the massively complex feelings he couldn’t find words for.

“He
was
happy. The past sixteen years were great… not perfect, but there were a lot of great moments.”

“But wouldn’t perfect have been boring?”

“Hmm, right, nothing more boring.”

A conversation he once had while on one of his afternoon walks with Dana came to mind—the same topic: contrast—all the ups and downs, peaks and valleys within relationships. “You know what bothers me?”

“No. What?”

“Knowing that she’s…” He stopped himself from saying it, hoping Joyce would let him off the hook.

“Roland?”

“You think we’re the same man?”

“Yes.”

“The boat,” he said.

“The boat?”

“The one in the photo.” He studied the picture—two contented lovers on the deck of a sail boat. “Was it ours?”

“No, we chartered it… a vacation.”

“Oh.”

“A sunset cruise on Sarasota Bay.”

“What a coincidence. Dana and I used to live near there; just a few miles away, in fact.”

“
Did
you?”

“The late eighties.”

“Huh…”

“Yeah.” Roland waited through another pause—thinking Joyce might have something more to add, but she didn’t. He wondered if he was maybe making her uncomfortable. “I probably should go,” he said. “I’m on Brian and Beth’s nickel.”

“Want me to call you?”

“Well, if you want.”

“If I want? I
did
mention in my letter that I’d welcome a call, anytime… for any reason, right?”

“I can be shy, you know,” Roland said.

“I know.”

“I really did enjoy this,” he said.

“So it’s okay if I call?”

“Yeah, of course… anytime.”

The exchange ended as awkwardly as it began. After a hesitant goodbye, Roland sat at the edge of the bed, the phone still in his hand, incredulous at having just had a conversation with Joyce Rubens, the little girl who’d haunted him for as far back as his memory would take him. He picked up the photo from the nightstand, and studied her face, trying to picture her ten years younger. He’d met Dana in ‘83, the same year Joyce claimed they had reconnected.
When in
‘
83
?
Before Dana
? He gazed at the photo, not really seeing it, but rather peering into an imagined scene somewhere beyond it.

What if it never happened? he wondered. What if Dana and I never met?

A
car, a job, an apartment,
a life beyond the limbo state Roland felt trapped in: ideas which had gained nagging prominence in his mind. Nearly a year had passed since his mysterious appearance in New York. Not that it mattered, as his sense of time had since been whipped into a nonlinear fog—five days, eight months, one second, six weeks—it all blended into an indivisible lump of time. He suffered an ever intensifying desire for change, for normality, straight and narrow, and for months, struggled to stay aligned with a plan, which kept shifting beneath him. Joyce had finally convinced him to come to Phoenix for a visit. She offered him the car that had been sitting unused in her garage. It was, and had always been, registered in his name. All he’d need was a driver’s license—a minor issue, for which Joyce had a solution.

Roland sipped ginger ale from a thin plastic cup, yet feeling weak from the cold and flu he’d contracted six days earlier. Seven miles below, the featureless flatness of Kansas crept sluggishly by in the little oval window to his right. His thoughts wandered between lifetimes, as they so often did of late—his childhood, Selma, growing up in Indiana, Nancy and their move to Stelle, and then the strange days leading up to his first evening with Dana.

The thought of Nancy brought the beginning of a smile to his lips, as it was she who, in the fall of ‘83, in a most unorthodox manner, played the unlikely role of cupid in his pursuit of Dana. Nancy—his not-so-loyal, not-so-devoted wife. He could hardly revisit that period of his life without a strong regard for his ex-wife and the outrageous influence she seemed to have had over his future.

They lived in an old, rundown Victorian in Kempton, Illinois—a small farming community about sixty miles south of Chicago. Located six miles to the east of Kempton was the community of Stelle—the original reason they’d moved to this otherwise pointless expanse of corn and beans. Unable to afford the rents of the new homes, which largely made up the calculatedly middle-class environment of the commune, they moved to one of the few nearby villages where the real estate was absurdly cheap and, from there, commuted. Their new lives there had started out smoothly—with decent jobs, their own home, lots of friends and parties—but then, within a few short years, their relationship began showing signs of stress. Shortly before the demise of their marriage, Nancy had expressed in clear terms her desire to move on to a better, more progressive way of life.

“Roland, you bore me to the point of intolerance,” was the blunt confession that left a permanent picture in his mind of his ex-wife’s emotionally complex face.

After months of painfully resisting her request for a divorce, he finally gave in. Ten years down the tubes. Defeat was not at all what he’d expected, however, but quite the contrary. Letting go evoked a sudden, irrefutable, lightness of being. It felt right—ordained by the omniscient ethers that permeated his universe. But his overdue acceptance of the inevitable, though a victory for Nancy, was not enough for her. Impatient for her freedom, she devised a plan to hasten the death of their relationship.

Late one summer evening, she’d suggested he make an effort to meet other women. “Invite someone over for dinner,” she said, effecting an aura of innocence. She even offered to prepare a meal, of his choosing, then leave and spend the night at a friend’s house—this, from a woman who had suffered unfounded paranoia and jealousy from day one. He’d be asking someone over for an affair,
yes, but was also being released from a contract, though unofficially. The problem was, all the women he knew were a part of the commune, everyone knew everyone’s business, and of course they were largely aware of his imploding marriage.

“They’re all either married, steady, too old, or too young,” he told his wife.

“What about Dana Serrano?”

“She’s seeing Randy.”

“No,” she said, “she’s not involved with anyone… not exclusively, I’m pretty sure.”

He mulled this over for a few minutes, and then, even though the eccentricity of the idea was still tacky with freshness, agreed to call her.

He’d only just met Dana, about a month earlier, at a party in Stelle. He liked her. They’d met over a table of refreshments, chatted for twenty-some minutes before being interrupted by Randy Binum, one of the several single males circling the commune like hungry vultures. Randy was a soft-spoken man of stocky build, who sported an irresistibly warm smile and possessed a southern-gentleman charm and matching accent, which was easily liked by most, including Roland.

It had ended too quickly, however, with Randy sweeping in on his prey, leaving Roland clinging at the outer edge of his holding pattern—hovering, feeling wedged-out, while only feigning engagement. After a minute or two of awkward uncertainty, he excused himself.

Though his conversation with Dana was brief, he nonetheless came away with a sense of affinity with her. She was someone he could be candid with. But then, candidness was emblematic of Stelle. One would move into the community and quickly become attuned to it, as though there was no other way.

Matching
his
candor, she’d made it known that she was recently divorced, jobless, homeless, in fact, with three small children who were with their father in New York at the time. Fine, he thought, okay… What does it mean? He efficiently dismissed her openness as typical small-town etiquette. He figured he’d eventually hear the story from another source, anyway.

And then, here he was, three weeks later. After finally having let go of his collapsing marriage, he entertained the possibility of an affair with this woman—possibly something more than a friendly social event.

“Do you know where she lives?” he said.

Nancy did, of course.

A curious feeling washed over him, a rollercoaster feeling—that start-up feeling, the feeling one gets as the hydraulic harness presses down into your lap, committing you to the ride ahead, your flesh suddenly alive with anticipation. He found himself with the handset of the phone pressed to his ear, listening to the rolling pulses—the phone at the other end, ringing once, twice—

“Hello?” A woman’s voice.

A rapid heartbeat later: “Hi. May I speak to Dana?”

“This is Dana.”

“Oh… this is Roland Bax. We met at the Community House party a couple weeks ago.”

“Yes, I know. I remember.”

Perhaps it was something in her voice—soft, steady, self-assured—maybe the fact she acknowledged remembering him, or her apparent lack of concern. Either way, the plunge had been taken. The water was not so cold, not so deep, nor so dangerous. “Do you have plans for Thursday evening?”

“Uh… well, no.”

“Would you care to have dinner with me… at my house?”

She hesitated, then, “Uh… could you hold on for just a minute?”

“Sure.”

The pause which followed gave him time to consider how utterly blunt his approach had been. A sense of inappropriateness slithered around the edges of his consciousness. A faint muffled-mumbling came over the phone, but he could make nothing of it. He’d somehow assumed that Dana would accept the invitation, but now his thinking impressed him as naive. The whole idea was at odds with his nature. He was more than aware of this, and, yet, it seemed he’d forgotten. It would, of course, get around Stelle—in an instant. What his friends and neighbors thought didn’t matter under the successful scenario, but now, all at once, it did.

“Roland?”

“Yes?”

“What time should I be there?”