You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

Your place, not at all what I imagined, has a minimalist rooming-house demeanor and exemplifies a casual disregard for the conventional verities of middle class/bohemian taste. I need to say something to cover my surprise, which is at first negative then something else, a kind of admiration bordering on awe.

  “You make interesting use of the space,” I say, my speech barely intelligible, though I can feel the numbness beginning to recede.

  “Do I?” you say, putting my jacket in the closet. “A lot of my stuff is still in boxes … Do you have any food issues?”

  “Issues?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t get what you said,” you say. “What I’m asking is, is there anything you don’t eat?”

  “Dirt.” I say, which does not produce a smile.

  In short order, you set the table in your eat-in kitchen and produce a chicken salad from the refrigerator swaddled in plastic wrap.

  “Maybe we ought to wait a few minutes,” I say. “The Novocain hasn’t worn off yet.”

  You nod to yourself, seem to repress a smile, and return the chicken salad to its former exile.

  I should pause here to remark that nothing happens between us—my coming to your apartment, your making me lunch, my inability to eat the chicken salad you offer—that leads or seems to lead to our going to bed together for the first time.

  Nevertheless it happens even though I am unable to chart the exact course that carries us from A to B or A to C or A to Z or whatever it is that represents our interlude in your bed before or after or instead of lunch.

  And so, after all the elusive elevator rides, after my long-standing tentative and failed pursuit, we get it together, we make love, as a time killer until I regain enough feeling in my mouth to get through the main agenda of lunch.

  In place of lunch, the sex aside, we share a glass of white wine and a cigarette.

  Afterward, when I am about to leave, you say, “Look, this won’t happen again. I want you to know that so there’ll be no misunderstanding down the road.”

  Before you say this, I am already in another place in regard to you. “Was I that much of a disappointment?” I ask.

  “To the contrary,” you say. “If we’re going to remain friends, and I really want us to be friends, I promise you I do, you’ll have to accept my terms.”

  “Do I get an explanation?”

  “There is none,” you say after a moment of what I hope might be reconsideration. “For the record—is getting into my pants the only thing that interests you about me?”

  And then I have this flash that you and Deidre have set me up, that it is all prearranged including the sex, and I elect not to play your game. “The only thing,” I say.

  “What?” Disbelief.

  I resist the impulse to explain myself, to say it is the only possible answer to your outrageous question. Instead, I collect my jacket from the closet. When I turn around, you are folded up on the couch, your head nestled into your arms like a bird, silently crying or offering your audience that impression.

  I stop at the door and look back, torn between wanting to get away and wanting to comfort you.

  The second option chooses me and I squat down on the edge of the couch and stroke your hair. And stroke your hair.

  Finally, you lift your head in a kind of slow motion, turning it just enough to glance in my direction. “Please leave,” you say.

  I think of myself, dignity in hand, getting up from my corner of the couch. In my imagination I am walking to the door, unlatching it, opening it, closing it quietly behind me, bounding down the four flights of stairs to the street, hoping to outrun the depression that beggars onto my sleeve as I go.

  In fact, in the unimagined world, I don’t move.

  FOUR

  ___

  I am in your bed, your back to my side, fiddling with the Double Crostic puzzle in the Sunday Times Magazine, when you turn toward me, propped on an elbow (last I looked you were asleep) and say without context, “Don’t you think that if you have been betrayed more than twice in your life, you have no one to blame but yourself?” You issue this provocative remark an hour or so after we have tangled, tangoed, on your Swedish bed and shortly before you confide that I am not the only man in your life.

  I assume that when you make the betrayal pronouncement that you are referring to me while, as it turns out, it is about the other. “Roger gets off on being betrayed,” you say. “I’m afraid his life would feel incomplete to him without it.”

  “Does he?” I say

  “Yes, I would say so,” you say.

  I am about to ask why you presume to know that I have a history of being betrayed—do I? I wonder—when you confess that you have been dating this guy, Roger, off and on for over seven years. Our connection has only a nine-months duration, though I have more invested in it than I like to admit.

  “Why have you brought this up now?” I ask.

  “Because I hate lying and liars,” you declaim as if performing before a TV camera.

  “But why now? Why not after we made love for the first time? Why not last week, say?”

  You rub your face against mine like a cat before answering. “I suppose I was afraid I’d lose you,” you say.

  Had you not brought up the issue of betrayal as such, I might have been able to accept your confession with better grace. Getting betrayed, that is knowing you’ve been deceived, is not easy to accept. I have been unhappily on both sides of that equilibrium.

  Let’s flash back to the week before when you offer me another kind of confession altogether. You mention with touching shyness as if it’s a dangerous admission that you love me. You make this confession twice actually in the same night—once in the throes and again about two hours later when I reenter your bed after a turn in the bathroom.

  When you tell me that you love me—the second time in particular—it is as though a windfall of grace has entered my life. And for an unguarded moment, I am aware, anxiously aware, of being happy.

  It is not inconceivable that you have had a similar conversation with Roger the day before or ten months ago, which vitiates my hopeful moment, perhaps erases it altogether.

  Roger is, among other things, an architect. We might have some history together, but I no longer remember what it is. You met him, you tell me, when his firm renovated your weekend house in Vermont. A wife, later to be former, was somewhere offstage.

  This much is relatively clear: my role in your life is to be the unwitting agent of Roger’s betrayal, for which Roger, who is addicted to being betrayed, is conveniently responsible.

  All this is playing in my head when I get up from your Swedish orthopedic queen-size bed—I am wearing a T-shirt and nothing else—and put on my pants. I have no idea how angry I am until you ask why I am leaving.

  “I thought I might call this other woman I haven’t seen in a while,” I say.

  “Who is this other woman?”

  “You have no reason to feel jealous,” I say.

  “So you say.”

  By the time you are up and about, I am a step from going out the door, though I am not averse to being stopped.

  “I’d appreciate if you didn’t leave like this,” you say in your most imperious voice. “We should discuss this, don’t you think?”

  Momentum has its own logic. I am on the other side of your door, the door closed behind me, halfway down the first flight of stairs, a slow-motion replay of hasty retreat.

  When I get to my place, which seems more than usually bleak, I can’t imagine what possessed me to walk out on you. There’s been no explicit agreement between us not to see other people.

  And I’ve never been a jealous man as such.

  I haven’t even removed my jacket and I am already conjecturing a return to the scene of the crime, playing out in the imagination the soap opera scenario of my reappearance at your door.

  I have a tendency, as I don’t have to tell you, to visualize the consequences of an act in advance of risking it.

  In one
of my scenarios, the last in fact, the defining moment, if you will, a man answers my knock at the door. He is wearing one of those silky dressing gowns that gangsters and cads wore in old Hollywood movies.

  If you call, which you don’t, and are persuasively apologetic, which you are not (and can’t be unless you call), it might make a decision to return less fraught with risk.

  In the end, my decision not to return makes itself. I can’t go back, not tonight, without suffering serious loss of false pride.

  I realize the position I allow myself has no flexibility, yet what else can I do?

  I meet you for dinner the following Saturday at a place we’ve never gone before. We take turns apologizing for our behavior on the night of your disturbing confession and then you say that if I ask you to stop seeing Roger, if that’s what’s necessary to return things between us to the way they were, you will think about it.

  Your offer surprises me—it was not one of my pre-dinner scenarios—so I have to listen to it echo in my head before coming to terms with it. “OK,” I say. “Yeah, sure.”

  My hesitation seems to disturb you. “If we make such an agreement,” you say, “you’re going to have to stop dating other people. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

  Although you are the only woman in my life at the moment, I balk momentarily at putting such an absolute restriction on my illusory freedom. Finally, I offer my hand to seal our bargain, which you accept with some hesitation of your own, giving it a parsimonious squeeze.

  After dinner, we return to your apartment, which is in keeping with our usual routine, scrunch down on your familiar, not quite comfortable couch, and neck like teenagers in a car parked on a dark and silent street. Then instead of moving into the bedroom, closing the deal as it were, we get into talking in a less guarded way than usual and we both admit—you first—to distrusting somewhat the other’s ability to remain faithful.

  “I want to trust you,” you say, “I really do, but I don’t know that I can, I really don’t. There’s this other woman in your life and there’s Roger in mine. I wonder if it’s such a good idea to stop seeing others—you know what I mean?—while there’s all this potential distrust between us.”

  “Hey, it was your idea,” I say. “You said if I asked, you would stop seeing Roger.”

  “As usual, you’re misquoting me,” you say. “What I said was, if you asked me to break with Roger, I would think about it, which is what I’ve been doing. I’m thinking why should I give up Roger if you continue to see whoever you’be been seeing. You haven’t even given me a name. Who is the woman you went to see last Saturday after you left my bed?”

  “The name doesn’t matter,” I say, unwilling to acknowledge at this point that your rival is imaginary.

  “I want a name,” you say. “I want everything out in the open between us or we have no deal.”

  I put on my shirt and slide into my pants one leg at a time before I answer and even then, I hesitate, flirt with the idea of making up a name, which I reluctantly reject as a gesture of bad faith.

  “Are you going to run out on me again?” you ask. “If you do that to me again …” You leave the threat implied.

  And then (for no reason it seems to me—perhaps because I smile, or smirk as you say), you flail at me, hitting me repeatedly in the chest, the blows without much force though cumulative in their impact.

  I have to grab your wrists to get you to stop, but that only seems to fuel your rage.

  “Why won’t you tell me her name?” you whisper as though it were a scream. “Is she that important to you?”

  “There is no name,” I say. “Think about it. A name will make this person who doesn’t matter to either of us memorable in a way that will make us both unhappy.”

  “I am already unhappy with you,” you say.

  We go on this way for a while, the stakes increasing as the argument deteriorates into pettiness, the realm of the unforgivable.

  “I’m glad this has happened,” you say, meaning the opposite or at least something else altogether. “It has definitely shown me a side of you you’d kept hidden from me and for good reason. You always seemed kind to a fault, but that’s not who you really are, is it?”

  Your verbal attacks, like your punches, make incremental inroads on my defenses. “Stop,” I say, wrapping my arms around you, an embrace you tolerate for the briefest moment before pushing me away.

  “I feel oppressed by your presence,” you say, walking out of the room, throwing the remark back at me over your shoulder.

  “What are you talking about?” I call back, not wanting the answer, on the edge of knowing it.

  You don’t return right away, and, when you do, you seem surprised that I’m still on the scene. “I felt this before,” you say, “but I couldn’t define it exactly. You take up all the air in a room. You have an oppressive presence.”

  I probably take your remark more literally than I should, but I don’t know what else to do with it. “I’m sorry,” I say, my regret unfocused.

  You wave off my meaningless apology. “Being sorry doesn’t change anything. You are who you are.”

  I resist the self-defeating impulse to defend myself and take a different tack equally humbling. “Just a few weeks ago” I say in a childish squall, “you said that you loved me.”

  “Really, sweetheart,” you say. “One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”

  I wait around in my most nonoppressive mode, waiting for you to recant your disaffection, but it doesn’t happen, hasn’t happened, has no chance of happening. I am stuck, irrevocably oppressive, oppressing myself and anyone else in the sway of my shadow.

  My exit line is not worth thinking about, let alone repeating here.

  A few days later, I receive a phone call from someone calling himself Roger as if the name is supposed to mean something to me, suggesting we meet for a drink the coming Thursday after work.

  “I’m busy on Thursday,” I say. “Besides, if this is what I think it’s about, I don’t see the point.”

  “No point, huh?”

  “I think you know what I’m saying,” I say.

  “Aren’t you even a little curious to hear what I have to say? Look it doesn’t have to be Thursday. You choose a time and a place and I’ll make it my business to be there.”

  “What about Thursday at four?”

  He makes an extended noise, somewhere between a laugh and a groan or some combination thereof. “It’s a little early in the day for me, but OK.”

  “You sure it’s OK?” I say.

  “Didn’t I just say so.”

  “You sound unconvinced,” I say. “How will I know it’s you?”

  He laughs which breaks up into a cough. “I’ll find you, buddy.”

  At a little after four on Thursday, I make my way to the Brass Bar, a six-block walk from my apartment, after deciding, during a night of fragmentary dreams—one in which I find a translucent baby hiding out in the sock drawer of my dresser—not to bother.

  I look around before taking a booth—the place is uncharacteristically half-empty and ominously silent—but recognize no one who even remotely resembles Roger. None of the all-day topers at the bar return my glance.

  I am relieved that Roger isn’t here and it suits my sense of irony that, after pushing for this meeting, he is the one not to show up.

  A minute or so after I make myself at home in an empty booth—it’s almost as if no time has passed—a man about my height and weight, though notably older and without a beard, slides carelessly into the seat across from me.

  His arrival thwarts me. In the story I’ve already written in my head, Roger does not materialize.

  Without acknowledging me, he explains his delay. “Something came up at the last minute—I actually had my coat on at the time—one of those crisis-creating, unsolvable problems. I couldn’t pull myself away until I did.”

  There’s something familiar and annoying about his manner. “We’ve met befo
re, I think, haven’t we?”

  “I recognized you the moment I came in the door, though it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve met. I’m sure you know what I mean, no? We may have met but it would have been a long time ago.”

  An image of a younger Roger—he actually looks like an older version of the baby in my sock drawer—comes to mind. “Didn’t we once, maybe four years ago, maybe five, play in a doubles game at the Wall Street Racquet Club?”

  “Not likely. I haven’t played tennis since I started having problems with my back.”

  “Lower back? Predominantly on the left side?”

  “Right side.”

  “I remember you had an unorthodox serve that was inexcusably effective.”

  “Would it were so. My serve, even before my back went out, had been inexcusably ineffective. And it was nothing if not orthodox. I took lessons for almost as many years as I was in analysis. I’m sure you’re anxious to know why I asked for this meeting. It wasn’t to bounce around my tennis serve.”

  “I remember now—it was your partner, Cyrus something, he was the one with the odd service motion. It was something like Jacques Tati’s serve in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday!”

  “The last time I played doubles, I partnered with a man named Sydney.”

  And then for an almost five-minute stretch—the waiter interrupts whatever it is to take our order—neither of us has anything to say.

  It is Roger who eventually breaks the silence. “I have to say you’re not at all what I expected.” He wags his head at me in reproof.

  “How so?”

  He shrugs. “For starters, and please don’t take this the wrong way, I can’t begin to imagine what our mutual friend sees in you. I expected someone better looking with more charisma. No offense.”

  “Only a little taken.”

  “Look, I had asked to meet you because I thought—I’m not even sure I’m saying this the right way—that we might make common cause … Look, it’s a dumb idea. I already regret bringing it up.”

  “The common cause thing, you mean concerning …?” And I mention your name. “Anyway, I’m out of the picture.”