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Chez Charlotte and Emily
Chez Charlotte and Emily
Chez Charlotte and Emily
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Chez Charlotte and Emily

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Imagine a bookish man named Francis D., swimming at a public beach in Cape Cod, who drifts out beyond his depth. Imagine that he doesn't drown, that the tide carries him to a private cove where he is rescued by two mysterious young women named Charlotte and Emily. Imagine then that Francis leaves behind his former humdrum life-his formidable wife and teenage daughter-and embarks on a series of violent and erotic adventures, as dream-like as reels of film. Imagine at the same time that a man named Joshua Quartz is telling his silent wife, Genevieve, the story of Francis's adventures, that they have little other communication, that the story is a way of keeping contact between husband and wife alive. Imagine that at some point Genevieve tells her own story, within and without Joshua's account. Baumbach's characters make occasional connections, make love and war, in the disguises of metaphor. If the main action is dream-like or fantastic, the real world is always at the window looking in.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 15, 2014
ISBN9781573668231
Chez Charlotte and Emily
Author

Jonathan Baumbach

Jonathan Baumbach is the author of seventeen books of fiction, including Pavilion of Former Wives, Dreams of Molly, Flight of Brothers, You, or The Invention of Memory; On The Way To My Father’s Funeral: New and Selected Stories; B: A Novel; D-Tours; Separate Hours; Chez Charlotte and Emily; The Life and Times of Major Fiction; Reruns; Babble; and A Man to Conjure With. He has also published over ninety stories published in such places as Esquire, Open City, and Boulevard. Baumbach, co-founder of the Fiction Collective in 1973, the first fiction writers cooperative in America, has seen his work widely praised. His short stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best of TriQuarterly. The New York Times Book Review referred to him in 2004 as “an underappreciated writer. He employs a masterfully dispassionate, fiercely intelligent narrative voice whose seeming objectivity is always a faltering front for secret passion and despair.”

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    Chez Charlotte and Emily - Jonathan Baumbach

    GODARD

    All they talked about for weeks when they were alone was the weather. How little sun they had had that summer, how changeable it was, how disappointing this summer's weather as opposed to last year's or the year before's. Otherwise when they were together, she read a book or the paper—how much time Genevieve could give to the most newsless of newspapers—and he would sit, book open on his lap, in a hard-backed chair on the other side of the room, dead to himself. Sometimes he would be the one reading—it was curious how rarely they did the same things at the same time—and she would sit, empty-handed, thinking of one thing or another, her large grey eyes closed or focused inward. She wondered (her wonderment kept to herself) if she would ever again have anything to say to him. Sometimes when he was there, when he was silent and there, she thought of the room as being empty. She thought of herself as alone in the room or alone in no place at all, though he was there in the room with her for all eyes to see.

    I am writing a novel about these two, Joshua and Genevieve Quartz who, each in private crisis, are unable to talk to the other except in displaced language. As I write this, Genevieve sits across from me, characteristically distracted by interior vistas. From time to time, I stop work and read a paragraph to her, eliciting not so much response to my prose as acknowledgement of my presence. I incorporate her muted reactions into the story, elaborate on them, transcribe them into language. The story, while it is being written, is my communication with Genevieve, a spoken letter in the guise of a novel about us and some mirror images of ourselves. Listen to this, I say, and she lifts her head. Whatever fails to engage her, I discard or revise. That's not funny, she says at one point. I wasn't trying to be funny, I say, which is only partly true. You tend to go to extremes to hold the attention of someone whose mind is committed elsewhere.

    I'm not distracted all the time, am I? Genevieve asks.

    I admit to overstatement. What do you think of what I read?

    The newspaper she has been reading rises like a tidal wave between us.

    Genevieve, what do you think of what I read so far?

    Genevieve is silent for the longest time. I can't tell, she says. You'll have to read more or give up on me altogether.

    1

    The two women were sunbathing. Nora (who was Francis's wife) on her stomach, and Genevieve (who was mine) on her back. The sun this afternoon was vague at best. Flirting heedlessly. In fact, there had been little or no sun for the past forty minutes. Suspicion of its return, a feeling of it not mattering, sustained them in shared experience. When they talked, which was hardly at all, the sun's untimely decline or the whereabouts of one or another of their children were the topics of conversation. One of the men (I was the other), the one whose name was Francis Sinatra, was standing waist deep in the ocean, holding in his gut as if it were a life's work only recently discovered.

    His feeling about himself, one of several feelings though in momentary ascendance, as he stands chest deep in the ocean, looking out and in, all reflective surfaces mirroring his life, was that various women on the beach were staring at him. This fantasy—he was not altogether out of touch—gave him limited pleasure. That so many attractive women coveted him was in his view more curse than blessing, a pressure to extend himself beyond his known capacities. He felt an obligation not to disappoint those eyes that followed him, thought to satisfy expectation with a touch of the unexpected.

    A man had come over to where the women lay on contiguous towels and was saying something amusing to one or both of them. Genevieve, with one eye open, was smiling at him.

    This is Bobby Mitchum she said when I came up, this is my husband Joshua.

    We're neighbors I think said Mitchum, holding out a large gnarled hand, a digit missing on the fourth finger. You're in the A-frame, am I right, the Housefeld place. Played Wednesday night poker with Housefeld. The bastard in Capri this summer, his vacation bankrolled on my losses.

    Uhhuh said Joshua glancing at his wife who was shaking her head at him, a warning of some faux pas he had committed or was about to commit. He spoke his own name and received the other's hand.

    What do you do? whispered Nora, cigarette in her mouth, eyes narrowed against the smoke.

    I'm a beachcomber said Mitchum who was a therapist of some obscure denomination. Nora picked up her sunglasses from a folded towel and put them on. Really? asked Genevieve.

    I'm a fine-toothed beachcomber, he said, laughing his operatic laugh.

    Joshua sat down on the towel next to Genevieve who seemed to be leaning away to avoid the incidental meeting of their skins. Mitchum excused himself and walked on down the beach, his stomach out like a moon. A boy of five or six came up from the other direction and they embraced.

    Francis Sinatra, who had been diving into the waves, had a cramp in his side and wondered how he would ever get back to shore. He had been drifting against his will, the event both real and symbolic, and had gone out perhaps beyond his depth. If he didn't get back—he had been prepared for not returning since he turned forty and he realized in the middle of one night that there was no going back—would he (he wondered) make the obit page of The New York Times? In a small way, he thought. The space he got would depend on who else had died that day. He lay on his back like a beached whale. The tow (or tide)—he had once edited a novel about a long distance swimmer—was taking him further and further away.

    A deceiver of the public eye, Francis had always been somewhat undervalued.

    It was as if the shore line were receding, his observers edging nervously away from him, jealous of his audacity, afraid of that disease. Come back, he thought to call to the shore. I meant no great harm.

    He wondered if they knew that he had gone beyond his depth. (Would his enemies joke about it?) Perhaps a rescue party would be sent out to find him, though he was not one—his wife would no doubt report—to want anyone to make a fuss.

    Nora contemplated her widowhood, planned the costume and set changes of a new life. To avoid pretensions, to cloak them in mysterious disguise, she would resume her maiden (also professional) name. They would say, occasional strangers touched and mystified by her self-effacing disguise, Excuse me for asking but aren't you Francis Sinatra's widow. To which she would put on her bravest, most luckless and doomed face and whisper hoarsely, Henry would have wanted it no other way.

    Henry? they would say to themselves, admiring the unassuming bravery of the gold-and-black-weeded widow, how endearing for a man named Francis to be known to his nearest intimate as Henry. She was the embodiment of graceful courage, they would think, and one of the ten best-dressed women in mourning in America. Her husband, you may remember him, was the late irate Francis S, editor-in-chief of one of the few surviving independent publishing houses in New York. For the next two or three years all of his authors dedicated their books to him, though no commercial publisher in his right mind would publish them until the widow got on the phone and said, Do it for Francis (or Henry), he had great respect for the talent of S_____ B_____ or whoever it was. The book has limited sales potential Nora dear, said the publisher known to have been a friend and admirer of Francis's in their mutual day. We appreciate your interest in S. B.'s script but we're looking this year for multi-levelled writing or books which retail the disguised secrets of the famous and the powerful. Just this one, Townsend, she would whisper. Otherwise D will get it and Francis will turn over in his grave at how they'll give Sam's book all the wrong kind of publicity misconceiving the work's inherent intention.

    After six or seven of such modest calls, Nora Hellmar became generally thought of as the most influential widow in American publishing. Literary agents pursued her good graces, took her to lunch at the Russian Tea Room where the regulars paid court to her husband's memory and her lively fading beauty. Her sharp tongue was the envy of headwaiters. Young novelists and visiting dignitaries courted her with first editions and jewels, proposed marriage and occasionally got into her East Side apartment.

    Nora was thinking of writing a memoir of her life with F as a useful corrective to false reports. Shared Vision by Nora Hellmar. She would confide how Francis liked best to make love at 5 A.M., a time when she couldn't get either her eyes or her legs to open. A conjugal rapist, her late husband, who liked his partners tacitly unwilling.

    They were going that evening, she remembered, to a cocktail party in Truro, the kind of party that made her feel bodiless like some truculent breeze that followed in her husband's swath. She wanted to go to a party for once where she would be the center of things, the one whose company they sought.

    Nora imagined she saw Francis swimming toward the shore, his progress relentless and infinitesimal, his breath like ashes on the waves. Her vision of him precluded his survival.

    Josh dreamed he was riding in an open car with John F. Kennedy listening to news of the assassination of Lyndon B. Johnson on the radio. The two men rode in the open car while a report of the assassination played over and over again like a recorded message.

    Does that make you President again?

    I didn't want it that way, said the other. That loud mouf sonofabitch is always getting himself killed.

    I thought you were the one, said Josh respectfully. That's the way it reads in the history books.

    The other said, Well you can't believe everything you read. Not everything, Josh, that passes currency in the world is real. The story of my marriage, for example. I was never married. They all said it and wrote about it, and they had pictures of it—that's the easiest thing, the pictures—so that I didn't want to ruin their party by saying nay. Between you and me, old friend, it never happened.

    Genevieve was crying when he woke, folded up on the other side of the bed. You're always here when I don't want you, she said.

    What's the matter? he asked in his dry voice, his voice pretending he was not angry at her, not beyond patience.

    I don't know, she said, as if to say I can't stand it or I can't stand you or I can't stand whoever I am.

    Is there anything I can do?

    No.

    Nothing?

    Yes. You can go away.

    What if he never reached the shore, what if he continued to swim toward the beach and had his efforts cancelled out by the tide?

    When lovemaking with experimental writers Nora would wear a black-bordered nightgown in memoriam for her deceased husband. Sleeping with her was like a publication, a getting between covers, a young writer might report. She conferred such recognition on only the most outrageous (and unpublishable) of fictionists, doing her part to uphold F's standards, idealistic about literary matters.

    Francis was dying of frustration, at the mercy of forces he had all his life refused to acknowledge. The undertow cancelled out his most resolute exertions. He moved from back to side from side to back like an insomniac, unable to find a comfortable spot, his cramp never leaving him for more than a moment at a time. Stubbornness kept Francis afloat, a resistance to the obvious. He went under and came up, drifted with the current, imagined a scenario that would permit him to survive without undue violation of credibility.

    The current was moving east and carried him beyond a wall of rocks toward a natural cove, about two miles (he estimated) from the point of his departure. It was like the plot of some of the novels he had seen in manuscript that he had not the slightest interest in publishing. Francis's commitment as editor had always been to language and form, mediated by a grudging respect for the mysteries of human behavior.

    Two strange child-women, sisters, perhaps twins, would find his half-drowned carcass washed up like driftwood sculpture on the shore the next morning. His real name would mean nothing to them or would ring with false associations. He would pretend to himself that he had forgotten that name and invent another unused by anyone of his acquaintance. The girls, intelligent primitives, dropouts from civilization, would nurse him back to sentient life.

    It would be a return to the beginning as if civilization as we know it (or think we know it) had been dreamt or imagined.

    Francis's new life is uncomplication itself. The unnecessary, such as it was, has been stripped away. Existence has been refined into eating and jogging and sleeping with his rescuers, Emily and Charlotte. His new name, the only name they know him by, is Tom.

    In the early morning (6:00 A.M.) before Poor Tom, as they call him, is awake, Emily draws water from the well, milks the goats and fills one of Charlotte's old hats with wild blueberries from which she will make blueberry pancakes for his breakfast.

    She will wake him at 6:45 by whispering a recitation from Andromache by Racine, a bitter tirade against the tyranny of men, the same set piece each morning, the only part she knows by heart. It never, at least not often, fails to get him up.

    Afterward, lying shyly next to him in the narrow bed, she will say with one or two expressive variations, I know it can't last, but I'm glad to have you, if only for a while.

    At 8:35, he will start out on his morning run, taken on a narrow winding path through the woods, sunlight (on sunny mornings) like jewelled dust washing through the trees across his naked back. On his return at about 10:45, breath coming in slivers of pain, he meets Charlotte coming toward him on her late morning walk. The narrowness of the path, the intricacies of its twists and turns—sometimes you seem to come up behind yourself—makes contact difficult to avoid.

    Unable to get out of the other's way, holding each other to cushion the impact, they tumble onto a bed of pine needles, creating pleasure out of the raw material of circumstantial connection. We mustn't, Charlotte will say. And after lovemaking: Forgive me, Em. Forgive me.

    These effusions of guilt, coming before and after, give a sense of form to otherwise formless behavior. In between, all prerogatives of self are given up. Their transgression is characterized by uncontrollable appetite, a tearing at each other like cannibals, restraint a lost memory of another life. Charlotte will cover her mouth with her hand to muffle her cries, some slipping through her fingers and singing through the woods and he, Tom, grunting, his heart shrieking like the brakes of an old car, will die and come to life, one and the other, not in that order, not necessarily, again and again.

    When it is done it is done. Her clothing restored, she will continue her walk as if nothing has interrupted it. And he, Tom, will lie on his back in the pine dust, staring at fragments of sky until himself again, resurrected, he returns, walking, from his morning run. A regimen, although imprecise in its repetitions.

    There are only a few books in the cabin, an odd lot, Holy Bible, Show Boat by Edna Ferber, Richard Feverel by George Meredith, Our Bodies Our Selves, The Sirens of Titan, The Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, Little Women, In France It Was Spring, Kitty Foyle, High Priest, The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, Kidnapped, Corpse in the Waxworks, which he goes through in his first month of exile, needing some lingering vestigial contact with the written word. One cold evening, at Charlotte's request, they burn the books in the fireplace to heat the cabin. It saddens him at first, but later when there is no undoing it—he puts his hand in the fire too late to rescue Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson—he feels strangely exhilarated.

    Without books, he is forced to invent imaginary experience. Sometimes when alone with Emily he tells her stories, fictions about his life which she takes in her credulousness for truth. As time wears on, he gets better and better at it, persuades himself of the actuality of what he has spontaneously imagined.

    One day, years later (he conjectures), circumstance will reveal his true identity to Emily and Charlotte. They may forgive him his deception, one of them may, but their lives together will be irrevocably altered. Some tragedy (or pathos) will come of it.

    In the afternoons, Francis works on the screenplay of the life he has imagined for himself, rehearsing it image by image in his head, a hobby at first, a way of passing time, but gradually evolving into an obsession.

    Emily too has her secrets. When Tom leaves her each day for his run through the woods, she writes his stories down, reordered by priorities of memory, in a special notebook she keeps under her

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