You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  The name, which I’m committed not to divulge in this text, enlists a sigh, perhaps even an accompanying blush. “Yes and no,” he says, then he confides with a kind of hollow bravado that he has made up his mind to end his relationship with you.

  By this time, people are standing two and three deep at the bar and the booths are filling up, which makes it prohibitively hard to hear someone across from you murmuring, particularly someone like Roger who tends to make conversation as if the listener were an eavesdropper on his introspection.

  So I can’t vouch for the accuracy of what remains of our conversation. Occasionally your name resounds through the din and the word “love,” but not the connecting context. “I have no illusions,” I hear him say, a rueful boast. “At my age, what’s the point?”

  “I hear you,” I say, meaning less and more than it suggests.

  He leans forward in a confiding posture. “I knew as soon as I saw you that you were someone I could talk to without the usual self-regarding bullshit. I trashed a marriage of sixteen-years duration to be with her. I have a daughter—she’ll be graduating Yale at the end of the year—who has never quite forgiven me and whose life is a disaster area because of my divorce from her mother. So you can understand why I have an outsized investment in this relationship and I’ve hung in like a trooper until now, until last week, when a less obsessional person would have long since cut his losses.”

  “I’ve been in situations like …,” I start to say, but he interrupts before I can finish the thought.

  “On three different occasions I asked { } to marry me. It was in response to my third proposal that she told me there was someone else. The someone else of course was you. I told myself: Roger, don’t be an asshole, you’ll never get what you want from her, but still I couldn’t let go. It was only after I talked to my nutritionist, who serves as an all-purpose advisor, that I found the inner strength to end it.”

  “Have you told her of your decision?”

  “Tonight … Is it true that you’re no longer diddling her?”

  Maybe he doesn’t say diddling—there is wall-to-wall noise in the bar—but it is something like it, meaning approximately the same thing. My impulse is to console him, but I merely nod.

  “It would be a nice irony if she lost us both.”

  I begin to see what you mean by Roger being responsible for the betrayals in his life. His occasional assertiveness is a form of disguise. Something in his manner, something deceptively subtle, asks the casual acquaintance to take advantage of him.

  “If neither of us is seeing her,” I say, “then her game, if game is the word for it, has been self-defeating. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I have to go,” he says abruptly, extending his hand as an afterthought.

  I do not say that I am pleased to have met him.

  We make no arrangements to meet again.

  A month or so after the meeting with Roger, I run into you on the street in front of the Film Forum. At first sighting, I am spectacularly glad to see you. You keep your distance, which disappoints me, act as if you haven’t noticed my presence. To protect you, or to protect myself, I also look away.

  Then, with a kind of abrupt determination, you come over, calling my name as you approach.

  “You’re looking the same,” you say as if years have passed since we last saw each other. I kiss you awkwardly on the cheek, which you present as if it were the Pope’s ring, though in the next moment you wrap your arms around me and give me an extended hug.

  “If you’re here by yourself,” you say, “why don’t you join us.”

  “Us?”

  “I’m meeting Roger,” you say.

  “The endlessly betrayable Roger?”

  “What?”

  “Not worth repeating,” I say. “And how do you know we’re even planning to see the same movie?”

  “You are here to see the Rohmer,” you say, winking at me. “Am I right?”

  You are, though to defend myself from your presumptions I am prepared to deny it, when Roger ambles up to us.

  “Look who I found,” you say.

  Roger does not seem pleased at my presence, though he manages a wry, civilized smile, and offers his hand.

  It’s not that I don’t consider going to see the Anthony Mann thriller in the film noir series in the smaller theater. It’s just that I end up following the two of you in, which includes entering the same aisle and taking the seat next to yours with Roger on the other side of you. I say end up, though of course no one forces me to follow you into the row you’ve chosen for us.

  When your arm brushes mine, I take my elbow off the arm rest and drop it on my leg like a piece of discarded clothing.

  I watch the movie, which is about a married woman taking out a personals ad in order to find a man for her reticent unmarried friend and then meeting with one of the respondents in a succession of dates while pretending to be someone she’s not.

  You seem to me at the moment like the heroine of the film, a perception I immediately distrust, in certain not easily definable ways.

  I can’t say who initiates the gesture but we hold hands secretively for a while, your hand withdrawn as the film fades into the titles.

  We end up at a café a few blocks from the theater and use the movie to talk in coded ways about the tensions inherent in our immediate situation. Roger, for example, sees the movie as a study in betrayal.

  You play us off for the most part with casual even-handedness, though I sense (perhaps mistakenly) that you prefer me to Roger. Once this perception locks in, virtually everything you do provides further evidence for my certainty. At some point, I find myself outraged on Roger’s behalf—this is not the you I care about—made uneasy by your casually dismissive treatment of him.

  Preferred or not, I am the one that gets up to leave.

  “Why don’t you come back with us,” you say. “I believe I have enough food in the fridge to make dinner for three.”

  “Thank you for the offer,” I say—how grotesquely polite we all are—“but I have other plans. Anyway, I’m sure that Roger, though too civilized to say so, doesn’t want me intruding on his date.”

  “I’d be happy to have you join us,” Roger says.

  So. The odd couple plus one trudge over to your apartment, though the sidewalk isn’t wide enough to walk three abreast and I find myself, as much by choice as circumstance, pulling up the rear like an orphan.

  Once in your apartment, we discover that there is less food in your refrigerator than estimated. The notion that you are prepared to cook a meal for us should have set off an alarm. When I first met you, you used to boast that you never put heat to food unless under duress, though other times you complained wistfully of how you liked the idea of cooking and wished you had more gift for it.

  Instead of having dinner, we drink brandy and nibble on hors d’oeuvres left over from an old party—a near rancid tapenade on wheat thins—and watch a French movie about cannibalism in Paris on IFC. Before the bloodshed starts, Roger dozes off on the couch and you mute the sound on the TV and we make conversation in counterpoint to the gory images in hushed voices.

  “You’re looking very fetching tonight,” I say.

  “You just want to get laid,” you say.

  When the movie concludes—there are English subtitles so the lack of sound makes it neither more nor less incoherent—we help Roger into the guest room, take off his shoes and pants and slip him under the cover like a family secret.

  I go into the bathroom and throw water on my face, in private unresolved debate on whether to take the subway or not, considering the difficulty in finding a taxi on your street at 1 a.m.

  “I’d invite you to share my bed,” you say, “but it doesn’t seem quite fair, does it, with Roger in the guest room. I’ll make up the couch for you.”

  “I’m thinking of going home.”

  “That’s just silly. You always stay over on Saturday night.”

  There is something ask
ew in what you say, but I am too unfocused to find the words to define my objection. You throw your arms around me and I take to be an inducement.

  “I’m really not overjoyed with the idea of staying on your couch,” I hear myself say in a peevish voice hardly recognizable as my own.

  “Not overjoyed, huh?” you say. “It was on our second date, if you remember—the night we went to see Mauricio Pollini at Carnegie Hall—that we used the couch to make our own recital. I don’t recall any objections that night.”

  “That was a more innocent time,” I say, though I have no recollection of the event you cite. I never went to a Pollini recital with you at Carnegie Hall.

  “While you are making your mind up, I’m going to brush my teeth if you have no objections. I believe you know where the sheets are if you want to make up the couch yourself.”

  I pick up the Times crossword puzzle from the foot of the couch while you are in the bathroom—you have completed about a third of it—and scan it with a pen in my hand, resisting an impulse to correct a mistake.

  You yank the paper from me when you return, saying you were planning to finish the puzzle yourself for God’s sake. I almost grab it back, which is one of the few unexamined impulses I resist that night.

  “All right,” you say, “you can come into the bedroom if you insist but no sex, OK? I want your word on that.”

  “No sex,” I say.

  “You promise?”

  “I don’t promise.”

  “OK then.”

  We have both been drinking steadily for about three hours at that juncture so we have a built-in excuse for irresponsible behavior.

  Anyway, I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, though I am distantly aware of you lying next to me in your satiny purple nightgown, your thigh brushing the back of my hand.

  I dream of burrowing my face into some woman’s swollen (pregnant?) stomach—she is your sister in the dream, a near twin, someone whose existence you’ve kept from me—and wake to find myself alone in your bed. After a moment of figuring out where I am, I make my way to the bathroom.

  I pee for what seems like five minutes—it’s as if I’ve sprung this endless leak—all the time wondering where you might be. Challenged by your absence, I find my way into the kitchen, which has a small light over the sink, a kind of night-light for dirty dishes. Sure enough there is your scary cat, an oversized, long-haired feral tabby perched on the dishwasher, staring balefully at me, but no sign of you.

  I pad back into the bedroom, thinking maybe you have returned in my absence. There are lots of shadows in the dark room, which suggest the possibility of a human form, and I take the trouble to whisper your name, a ghostly call that goes unanswered.

  There is only one other place you might be and I refuse to acknowledge the possibility.

  I put on my pants—I had been sleeping in my underwear—and sit hunkered over on the edge of the bed, wondering if I have it in me to get back to sleep. I close my eyes and imagine you standing over me, your fingers brushing my lips.

  When I hear a murmur of voices—it may be from the apartment upstairs or the loose wiring in my head—I leave the room again to check out their source.

  At that moment, the door to the guest room opens mysteriously and a shadowy figure emerges from the darkness. You are wearing a flimsy pale green robe over your satin nightgown.

  “What’s going on?” you ask me.

  “I might have asked the same question,” I say.

  “I was just checking to see if Roger was all right,” you say.

  “Was he?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “No surprise there.”

  “Don’t be ugly, sweetie,” you say. “I spent most of the night in bed with you, didn’t I?”

  “Did you? I don’t remember much of what went on.”

  “You were asleep,” you whisper. “You slept like a stone.”

  “Oh,” I say. “That must explain it.”

  “Are you being sarcastic, sweetie?” you ask. “I’m not responsible for you being asleep, am I? I’m going to make a pot of coffee if the interrogation is over.”

  The interrogation, as you call it, isn’t over, but you don’t wait for my permission to leave. “Wait a second,” I say to your back or imagine myself saying.

  In the bathroom, I am assaulted by the weary, unsympathetic image that peers back from the mirror. The toothbrush I use when I stay over is not in its usual place and, after looking through the medicine cabinet to no avail, I brush my teeth with my finger. As I leave the bathroom, Roger, who is standing outside the door awaiting his turn, insists on shaking my hand.

  I have to get out of there immediately, I tell myself, working up a sense of urgency some part of me continues to resist.

  No matter, I stay for breakfast—you have made blueberry pancakes with sausage and grits on the side. The temptation of the pancakes gets the better of my internal alarm.

  I end up sitting directly across from Roger with you at the head of the table. “What do you guys want to do today?” you ask.

  I know I have something else on for today, though I can’t remember—it seems symptomatic of a larger failure—what that something else might be.

  “Sorry,” I say, getting up. “I have other plans.”

  “Really?” you say. “What are these other plans?”

  I wave off your presumptuous question. “Something I set up awhile back.”

  “Well, if you can’t come up with a better excuse than that,” you say, “I don’t see why we should let you off.”

  Roger guffaws with his mouth full of food—blueberries no doubt, but it looks like he’s spitting blood—catching the spray by rushing his napkin to his face.

  “You know what I’d like to do,” Roger says. “I’d like to see the Pollock show at the Modern. I’ve seen it once but I think a second visit will more than repay itself.”

  “The Modern tends to have long lines on Sunday,” you say, “and I know our friend here hates crowds.”

  “Your friend here has a previous appointment,” I say.

  “Absolutely,” you say. “How could I have forgotten? I just thought, not important really, that it would be nice for the three of us to do something together.”

  Nice!? I have no idea what’s going on with you. In any event, I am making my way to the door.

  I glance back at Roger while you are doing your number and he seems to be smiling bravely, unaware that his face can be read, through barely endurable pain.

  I come home to my lonely apartment after spending the long escapeless day, parading through museums so crowded that someone’s head has morphed into almost every artwork.

  The following e-mail arrives Monday morning.

  Wasn’t Sunday an extraordinary day!

  We must all do it again soon.

  Roger

  His note makes me want to put my fist through the wall, though I can’t (or won’t) say exactly why.

  Two weeks later when you call to invite me to dinner for “just the two of us,” I have to ask you to repeat your invitation before I can wrap my mind around it.

  “Gee, I hope you’re not mad at me,” you say. “You know appearances are not always what they seem. You just need to have more trust in people.”

  “I trust appearances,” I say.

  “Please don’t be clever at my expense, OK? If you don’t want to come to dinner, just say so. I’m not going to fall apart.”

  I have already fallen apart, but it isn’t anything I care to admit to you so I stall for time, hoping to intuit which of my choices, once irrevocably made, would be the less regrettable. “I may have a prior appointment,” I say. “I’ll have to look in my book.”

  “So you won’t come—is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I’ll see if I can get out of it and call you back,” I say.

  “I don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s disappointment,” you say. “We’ll do it another time.”

 
; “The appointment was made so long ago,” I say, “I’m not sure if it’s still in place.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ll call you back within two hours,” I say.

  “If you do, you do. I won’t hold my breath.”

  My first impulse after I hang up is to call back (after a suitable delay) and accept your invitation, though some whisper of dignity rises in me to refuse.

  To escape a decision I seem unable to make, I go out for a walk in the night air, end up at the Brass Bar, linger over two beers, trade quips with the bartender who is an aspiring stand-up comic, and faze out on a hockey game on TV as if I were watching a series of fast moving abstractions reconfigure themselves.

  An hour and twenty minutes pass and I become increasing obsessed with the arbitrary two hour deadline I have given you for my decision.

  Although I might have called you from the bar, I rush home. A half block from my apartment, I see you, or think I do, hurrying toward me.

  This makes everything all right until I discover it is someone else, a different shadow. The stranger, an Asian woman who may or may not be a streetwalker, asks me for a cigarette and for a moment I imagine myself going off with her and we end up dancing together in her one-room apartment, the wall space covered by posters from The Wizard of Oz.

  “Sorry, I don’t smoke,” I say.

  “I usually don’t make that mistake,” she says.

  When I get inside my own place and remove my jacket, leaving it on the chair near the phone, it is five minutes short of the two hour deadline. By the time I dial your number and, in doing so, revise my decision yet again, two more minutes have passed.

  I get a busy signal then wait thirty seconds and push redial. The same message repeats itself.

  Again: busy.

  Your circumstantial unavailability fuels a self-induced anxiety.

  I can imagine you saying, “I held the invitation two hours for you, which you asked for, right? But your time has elapsed and so I made other plans.”

  Anyway, I dial your number again, not trusting the redial to do its job, and this time it rings. I know you are there because only five minutes ago, the line was busy, but the phone keeps ringing without event—at least seven times to my hasty count—and then your recorded message breaks the pattern.