You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  And for a moment, awaking from my own self-involved scenario, I find myself lost in yours. “So you live in this building,” I say.

  “Oh no,” you say, put off apparently by my preferring the obvious conclusion to the unimaginable. “I’m staying with a friend while my place is being renovated.”

  While assessing the implications of your information, I make some awkward consoling remark about knowing from personal experience the trials of dislocation.

  “Did I ever tell you,” you say, politely ignoring my banalities, “that you look like a pirate?”

  We are now perhaps for the first time on the same page, but I pretend never to have heard this inexplicable perception from you before. “A pirate?” I say.

  You reassess me, squinting your eyes to get an unambiguous view. “I said this to you before, didn’t I?” you say.

  I want to ask, but don’t, whether it’s acceptable or not to resemble a pirate or even what it might mean in the general scheme of things. “Does that mean you are afraid of me?” I ask.

  You smile, barely, shift your feet, seem prepared to face dangers far more threatening than any I may represent. “I really have to get these groceries upstairs. It was nice seeing you again.”

  “Would you like me to help you with the bag,” I say.

  “Thank you for the offer,” you say, “but I don’t think it’s such a good idea. I’ll be back in my own place by next Friday unless the job takes longer than they say. I suppose everything does, right?” You take a small card from your purse—a reminder card for a dental appointment—and write down a phone number on the back.

  After that, we shake hands as if some kind of treaty has been concluded, and go our separate ways. The elevator, I notice, arrives at the behest of a man my father’s age, who holds the door for you as you slip inside, and you are already in flight before I have enough self-possession to toss you the shards of my name.

  Anyway, I have the name of your dentist and the time of your next appointment, which opens up another way of getting together circumstantially.

  It turns out that I am between dentists at the moment, my most recent guy, Dr. F, having retired abruptly for undisclosed reasons.

  I keep your card on my dresser, dental side down, and plan to call you when the week is out—I even make a notation on my desk calendar to phone you three days after your scheduled return—but it doesn’t happen.

  I decode my reasons, which are unconvincing even to me, and may be understood as follows. The friend you have been staying with who lives in the same building as my father and apparently on the same floor is, more than likely, more than just a friend. Therefore: what?

  I don’t call because I don’t want to trespass on a preexisting relationship and so become the agency of conflict and grief in your life. That can’t be true, but my reading of my resistance to using the number you gave me yields no deeper truth.

  Instead of calling you, I turn over your card and make an appointment to see your dentist. On my arrival, I am given a questionnaire to fill out concerning the highlights of my dental history. The last question asks the name of the person whose recommendation has brought me to this office.

  What’s it to them? I wonder, though I give them your name in case some free service is offered—a gift filling perhaps—for each new patient brought to their door.

  The hygienist is particularly brutal and complains throughout the treatment about the extent of my bleeding as if some failure of character were at issue. Before the dentist is brought in for the heavy lifting, she insists on giving me a lesson on flossing.

  “How do you know my sister?” she asks.

  I can’t answer of course, can only sit mystified in my supine position in her chair, until she gets her floss and fingers out of my mouth.

  “Your sister?” I say. “Why would I know your sister?”

  “When you floss,” you say, “it’s good thing to hold a mirror in front of you so you can see yourself flossing. Her name, you wrote her name on your questionnaire as your referral to Dr. Karsik, We’re actually half-sisters.”

  At this point, the bespectacled Dr. K, the dentist we now share, makes his first appearance on the scene. While inspecting my mouth, he keeps up a running stream of conversation with the hygienist, a kind of flirtation disguised and enhanced by insult.

  In the process, Dr. Karsik discovers two cavities, one barely emerging and the other in the need of immediate attention.

  So I make an appointment before leaving to return a different day the following week to have the more desperate of my two cavities attended to before matters get out of hand.

  A week or so before my return to your dentist, I actually run into you getting out of a subway train at Columbus Circle. This time we are both getting off at the same stop, though we make our almost simultaneous getaways from different cars of the same train.

  You are ahead of me and hurrying somewhere and I try to keep you in sight without giving the unavoidable appearance of running after you.

  And then someone else stops me to say hello, a former flame (whose name I can’t quite remember), whom I haven’t seen in what I estimate to be ten years. We exchange phone numbers and highlights of recent history and continue, our interlude concluded, on our separate ways.

  Nevertheless the encounter, which takes no more than three minutes, is sufficient for me to lose sight of you as you hurry to keep some unimaginable appointment.

  Well, perhaps it is imaginable, your destination. You were hurrying uptown in the direction of—why hasn’t this struck me before?—Lincoln Center. It’s likely that you are going to see a matinee and all I have to do is figure out where you might be going out of a handful of possibilities.

  By the time I reach Lincoln Center, my enthusiasm for the game of finding you has lost its edge.

  There are only two matinees, as it turns out, and a critics screening for the upcoming film festival. One out of three is better odds than I might have imagined, but on the other hand I have no basis for choice.

  Anyway, I have a day pass for the new Rohmer film awaiting me at the press desk, so I pick it up (at first they can’t find it, another delay) and I enter the dark auditorium a few minutes after “The Lady and the Duke” has started.

  At some point in the proceedings—there’s the usual elbow-tilting with my neighbor for the armrest—it strikes me that even if you are at the screening it won’t be a walk in the park to find you among the dispersing crowd.

  And then I think, the woman next to me on the right, the one with the aggressive elbow, might possibly be you. I like that idea and I hold on to it, imagine my feigned surprise at discovering you next to me.

  The movie, like many of Rohmer’s, though uncharacteristically set in the past (during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution), is about noble (and ignoble) self-deceptions.

  Before the lights go on, as the credits unroll, I slide out of the aisle and hang out with my back to the wall. You come out of my row—you were in fact the elbow on my right—and I am about to say something when I realize you are with the man trailing you and it is—he is—somebody I know.

  You ignore me, but he comes over to say hello and provides, somewhat belatedly, our first third person introduction.

  I take my cue from you, that is I pretend we don’t know each other, though it also strikes me that you have not remembered me (the pirate?) as your traveling companion on several elevator rides.

  We shake hands in this formal way as if parodying the ritual.

  “We’re going for a bite at O’Neil’s,” your companion, my nodding acquaintance, Roger, says. “Why don’t you join us?”

  I am already uncomfortable with the situation so I drudge up a pro forma excuse, an apocryphal appointment elsewhere, to avoid further awkwardness.

  “Do join us,” you say. “Roger tells me you’re a movie fanatic. I could use some clarity about what we just saw.”

  I play hard to get for no more than a few minutes befo
re agreeing to postpone whatever else of worked-up importance I had allegedly committed myself to.

  So my first meal with you, our first date so to speak, also includes Roger, who may (or may not) be the mysterious friend you were staying with while your apartment was being renovated.

  During our abbreviated first date—I suppose it isn’t really a date if Roger is with us—it is Roger who explains the movie to you, looking over at me from time to time as if anticipating my objection.

  “So the more things change, the more they remain the same,” Roger says in conclusion.

  “Isn’t that what you think everything’s about?” you say. “I think it’s about their loving each other and not being able to admit it even to themselves.”

  “What I said includes what you said,” he says.

  “That’s because it’s general enough to include almost everything,” you say.

  I say virtually nothing during the meal, listen to your dispute as if I were an invisible eavesdropper.

  At some point, Roger reminds me that (in case I’d forgotten) I have a prior appointment to keep and that they would understand my having to, as they say, eat and run.

  So what can I do but put on my jacket, say goodbye, throw some money on the table, and walk away, regretting my lies.

  You call after me, “You never gave us your take on the film. So?”

  I wave away the question as if it hasn’t quite reached me, but then I call back, unable to leave it unsaid, “I mostly agree with you.”

  When I get home I look for the dental card you gave me with your number on it, look in vain through the scraps of paper I keep in chaotic file on my dresser.

  I know I put it on top of my dresser—it’s where everything goes—and I know I haven’t removed it. But it’s no longer there.

  I move the dresser away from the wall, look among the decade of debris behind it and then get down on my hands and knees to look under the dresser. There is something there, but it is something else—the card for my next dental appointment, which I somehow figured was still in my wallet.

  The next time we meet is not in the dentist’s waiting room, but in a crowded elevator at the Brooklyn Museum. You are there with another woman while I am, as usual, alone. I am wedged in the back of the huge car, regretting my decision to ride, and you are at the front of the elevator, unaware of my existence.

  When the elevator deposits us on the fifth floor, I walk determinedly past you, hoping to be discovered.

  I hear you say something and I turn around, thinking it is addressed to me when it is not. “I’ll wait for you in the first room of the exhibit,” you say (have said) to your companion who is going off to the bathroom.

  “Oh hello,” you say, this time to me. “Where did you come from?”

  I don’t know where to begin, which prompts a silence that might have extended itself into mouth-gaping embarrassment without your intercession.

  “I don’t seem to be able to turn around without running into you,” you say.

  “I might say the same thing.”

  “Please don’t,” you say. “Say something original instead.”

  That leaves me searching in vain for a clever comeback just long enough for your friend to return and the two of you go off in your predetermined direction before I have a chance to offer an excuse for not getting around to calling you as promised.

  Your friend, Deidre, whispers something in your ear and you giggle, the sound hanging in the air as I turn away to check out the less notorious show in the other direction.

  But then you return, catching me off guard, to tell me that Deidre insists that it’s no fun looking at paintings of nude women without a man present.

  So I end up walking through the Exposed show behind you and sometimes between you, my opinion assessed at virtually every painting.

  “Does it induce prurient thoughts?” Deidre asks.

  “No thoughts whatsoever,” I say.

  “Salacious suppositions perhaps?” you say. “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate it?”

  I clear my throat.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Deidre says. “I happen to think this painting is hot.”

  “Do you?” you say.

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Deidre says. “This painting, The Goddess’s Surrender, is, to my untrained eye, the hottest painting in the room. But what do I know—I’m just a girl.”

  You turn to me and wink. “Whatever you tell us,” you say to me, lowering your voice, “it will not leave this museum. A show like this is no fun without a man’s point of view.”

  “The Goddess’s Surrender doesn’t do anything for me,” I say.

  “I rather think,” Deidre says, “that it does so much for you you’re embarrassed to admit it.”

  “There is nothing I’m embarrassed to admit,” I say, more mock bravado than outright lie.

  “Then you’re the boy we want with us on this trip down prurience lane,” Deidre says. “You’re our yardstick so to speak.”

  “But who’s counting inches,” you say—we are now in the second room—“Are you counting inches?”

  “Not me,” says Deidre. “What about you?”

  I pick out the least exposed nude in the room to admire, a small Sichert, which earns me a Bronx cheer from Deidre.

  “It’s always the same story with men,” Deidre says. “They pretend to know what we want but they never give it to us.”

  “I think the opposite is closer to the truth,” you say.

  “Do you?” Deidre says. “What can possibly be the opposite of my remark? Wait a minute. I think I see what you’re saying.”

  “In that case, I wish you’d tell me what it is,” you say.

  “I don’t want to embarrass your friend by explaining the obvious,” Deidre says. “I think we’re in serious danger here of crossing the imaginary line.”

  “Don’t be so cocksure,” you say. “My friend always looks a little uncomfortable even in the most unprovocative circumstances. I don’t know him well enough to say this, but I don’t think he embarrasses easily … Do you … embarrass easily?” she asks me.

  “Only when asked about embarrassment,” I say, more than a little uncomfortable.

  “That’s just something to say,” Deidre says. “That’s just trying to be clever in my opinion. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  It’s not clear to whom the question is addressed.

  You are not yourself in Deidre’s company—that is, the you that partners with Deidre is not a you I’ve met before. At this point, I am looking for an escape route.

  I loiter in front of a painting of a girl about fifteen, consumptively thin, wearing only a feather boa, while the two of you prance on ahead of me.

  “He’s less fun than frat house sex,” I hear someone say in a noisy whisper, unsure which of you it is, though willing to hold Deidre responsible.

  “Let’s lose him,” the second speaker broadcasts.

  When the two of you cross over into the next (and last) room of the show, I turn around and leave the exhibition.

  A few days later, early for an appointment at Dr. K’s, I meet you, or rather discover you sitting behind a book, in the waiting room.

  I nod in your direction and take a seat just far enough away so as to avoid you without overstating the point. Before I can open my newspaper, I realize that you are in the seat next to me.

  “I don’t have an appointment for today,” you say. “I knew from my sister that you were going to be here. That’s why I came.”

  “You came to the dentist to see me?” I say. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s it,” you say. “Look, I’ll understand if you don’t want to, but I’d be greatly pleased if you’ll have a cup of coffee with me as my treat after you’re done.”

  At that very moment, perhaps even before your sentence is completed, the receptionist calls out my name. The dentist apparently is ready to engage the cavity he had befriended on my last v
isit.

  I wave to you as I go off, find myself in the dentist’s chair, tilted back, bullets of cotton wedged in my mouth, when I realize that I hadn’t actually accepted your offer.

  By the time Dr. K finishes with me, the last thing I want is human company, and anyway you are not in the waiting room to meet me when I stagger out, much of my mouth still numb from the Novocain.

  And then of course I am angry that you are not there after going out of your way to find me and apologize (though you haven’t really apologized) and I walk to the subway with my collar up in the late afternoon chill.

  Then I see you, hurrying toward me, a large shopping bag in each hand. “I almost missed you,” you say. “Where should we go?”

  With my mouth insensate, I have difficulty making words so I offer a sympathetic silence.

  “Are you angry at me?” you ask.

  I quasi shrug, quasi nod, go through the motions of shaking my head, offer more than one conflicting message.

  “I want to get rid of these packages,” you say. “Why don’t we go to my place and I’ll make us a light lunch.”

  I am not ready to accept your offer, or perhaps I am more than ready to accept it, and I walk along with you, our arms avoiding touch and brushing almost simultaneously, to the nearest subway.

  “Look, it’s too nice a day to go into the subway,” you say. “Why don’t we take a cab. It’ll be my treat.”

  You don’t wait for me to respond to your offer—I’ve not said a word in the fifteen minutes or so following my escape from the dentist’s—but hail the first cab you see, which stops for us as if prearranged and before I can access my intention I am following you up the steps to your fifth floor brownstone apartment.

  As you unlatch the door with your key, I glance at my watch, an habitual gesture to no purpose, which you acknowledge with a corner of the mouth smile.