You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  And then, as I am about to say that I am free to come to dinner, that I am looking forward to seeing you, the phone goes dead. What is that about?

  I dial again, assuming that you were momentarily indisposed, assuming whatever I can to justify the unlikely, and I get another busy signal. In childish pique (see, I do not disguise my shortcomings), I hurl the phone across the room, watch it land unharmed on the couch.

  I have small—very small—tolerance for frustration and, though alone (unseen except by the reader), I am nevertheless embarrassed by my behavior.

  One more try, I tell myself. and that’s it. This is my last call.

  On the third (or fourth) ring, a man answers (it may even be a wrong number) and I hang up without speaking in a blind rage that takes a long time, months perhaps, even years to resolve.

  FIVE

  ___

  The next time we meet is in another country—Paris, as a matter of fact, the city of love (or is it light?)—at my brother’s wedding to your half-sister. In the intervening three years, during which I publish my third book (a modestly reviewed meditation on war called The Lion’s Share) I think of you no more than five or six times. From the moment I discover you, I try to catch your eye, but you never turn in my direction, seem occupied by the details of the ceremony or perhaps preoccupied in private reverie.

  At the reception that follows, one thing or another keeps me from approaching you, an ongoing intention unobtrusively thwarted. I have the sense on no evidence beyond the fact that circumstance never brings you close to my side that you’re willfully avoiding me.

  I am the only one of my brother’s family present for the occasion and, from what I can make out, one of the few Americans at hand. You are there with several people, perhaps one of them your husband, and appear to be an intimate of the bride. It is only later that I discover that there is a family connection as well—you share, or so everyone says, the same absent father.

  For a moment, I catch your eye and wav and you make an ambiguous face at me in return, mocking, petulant, self-parodying, impossible to decipher.

  I begin to wonder if it is really you and not some uncanny lookalike when the bride’s mother sidles up to me and asks if I would be so kind—the request elaborate and, under the circumstances, unrefusable. She is asking me to dance with her.

  It is not what I want to do and I make an awkward excuse or two (bad hip, naturally clumsy), which she steadfastly ignores, before leading her on to the floor.

  “My name is Madeleine,” she says in barely accented English. “I want to hear much about you. Are you a true person like your frére?”

  What can I say? Whatever I come up with is bound to seem either boastful or self-deprecating or some embarrassing combination of the two. “The question that had been on my mind,” I say, the first of several mistakes I make that evening, “is whether the mother is as beautiful as the daughter and that is already answered before I ask it.”

  “Je ne comprends,” you say. “I am or I am not?”

  “You are of course,” I say.

  “Oo la la,” you say. “Certainly not. It is a cruel compliment because so patently false and insincere.” All this is said as if she meant something else—not easy to say what that else might be—altogether. We finish the dance in relative silence, and I have the sense that I have disappointed Madeleine’s expectations.

  “Merci, monsieur,” Madeleine says when the music has stopped. “Thank you, Donald’s brother, for indulging the whim of an older woman.”

  “My pleasure,” I say and Madeleine laughs as if we shared some private joke, and waltzes off, aware of an audience, to greet whomever’s next on her agenda.

  I spot you at one of the hors d’oeuvres tables and I come up on you from behind and wait with willed patience for you to acknowledge me.

  “Not here,” you say without turning around. “Later.”

  “When?” I ask.

  “Go away,” you say, and I do.

  It comes out while I am paying my respects to the married couple that the bride is your half-sister on your father’s side and that the two of you have become fast friends on short acquaintance.

  “I’m sorry your dad couldn’t join us,” the bride says.

  “He’s also sorry,” I say to which my brother, standing behind the bride, rolls his eyes.

  The reason our father is not at the wedding is because my brother is not speaking to him, but apparently that is not the story in circulation.

  Madeleine appears and asks me if I need a place to stay for the night and I have trouble remembering if other arrangements were made and I say I don’t know.

  “Of course you’ll stay with us,” Madeleine says. “I’m not sure who else I’ve committed to, but we’ll find out soon enough.”

  Dinner comes first and I drift off with what appears to be an insider group which includes Donald and his bride, Madeleine and her fourth husband, Bruno, and you and your date among others. You still have not quite acknowledged me.

  During dinner at trendy Soixante-neuf, it strikes me that I left my overnight case in the closet of the reception hall or perhaps in the trunk of a taxi en route to the restaurant. My anxiety at its loss slips away after my second glass of wine.

  Just as the dessert course arrives, as if it were their cue, Donald and Lola slip off on their honeymoon. When they are gone, Madeleine, who is at the head of the table, gives an audible sigh of relief.

  Then I find myself sitting on a jump seat in an overcrowded taxi with Madeleine and Bruno, you and your date (whose name I understand is Roget) traveling to Madeleine’s house in the thirteenth arrondisement.

  When we arrive, there are some other wedding guests waiting at the door to whom Madeleine has also promised lodging for the night. We congregate in the living room to wait for our assignments.

  A mathematical problem ensues. There are four guest bedrooms in Madeleine’s charming, somewhat cluttered house, and nine people to accommodate.

  It makes sense of course to award the bedrooms to the couples, which leaves me, the only single on the scene, odd man out.

  “I have a perfectly comfortable folding cot,” Madeleine says, first in French then in English. “The question is, where do we locate this cot?”

  “I appreciate your concern,” I say, “but it’s no problem for me to stay at a hotel.”

  “I will take it as an insult if you leave,” she says, “and I am not one, I promise you, quick to forgive.”

  To avoid seeming difficult, I offer to spend the night on the living room couch.

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” Madeleine says. “Not at all. I will put a screen between us to give you intimacy. You will stay in my room.”

  “I think you mean privacy,” I say.

  “Do I?” Madeleine says. “Of course.”

  Everyone by this time has gone off to their assigned rooms except you and your date. During the preceding conversation, you have been browsing through the bookshelves that line the walls with the kind of concentration that seems to shut everything out so I am taken aback when you turn and say, “As always, Madeleine, you are too kind for your own good. This is your house and you have a right to be comfortable in it. So let me make a counter suggestion.”

  “Such as?” Madeleine says, perplexed as we all are by your unexpected intervention.

  “We can just as easily install your lovely screen in the room Roget and I will be staying in,” you say.

  “I wouldn’t hear of it,” Madeleine says. “The matter is settled.”

  “Really, Madeleine,” you say, “it makes no one happy to have you martyr yourself. Roget and I would be pleased to share our room in your lovely house with Donald’s brother.”

  The debate between the two women goes on for longer than needs to be described and I watch like a spectator with only a marginal rooting interest in the outcome.

  I am uncomfortably aware, though I have no idea of the history behind it, that the two of you have no love for one a
nother.

  At some point, Roget comes over to you, puts his hand on your arm and says in French—the following an estimate of his remarks—“This is Madeleine’s house, dear, and the decision where a guest will be put up should be hers to make.” He says this in a quiet voice but you push him away and whisper what I imagine to be the French equivalent of fuck off.

  Roget turns to me and shrugs.

  “Oo la la,” Madeleine says. And then, turning in my direction, adds, “You decide please.”

  The narrow-eyed stare she gives me has a different message altogether. It is as if she is daring me to refuse her and if I dare, I fall beyond the pale of her forebearance. She will not, perhaps never, forgive me.

  “Whatever you decide is fine,” I say, trying to occupy an ephemeral middle ground that probably does not exist.

  “Then it is decided,” Madeleine says, “I’ll get the cot for you and some linen.” She sweeps out of the room in modest triumph.

  Roget seems relieved, but you ask him, virtually order him, to go to the kitchen and get you a glass of white wine.

  He hesitates before leaving, seems troubled, considers refusing you, but decides to postpone whatever scene he will eventually make.

  And then for the first time that evening, we are alone. Everyone else has left the stage.

  “Look,” you say, “this has nothing to do with us; I want you to understand that. You and I are through as we both know; this had to do with Madeleine.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. Madeleine has a sweet tooth for younger men. She is a notorious man-eater. I stood up to her to protect you from an embarrassing situation.”

  “I don’t see why you think I need protecting,” I say. “Besides, Bruno will be in the room, won’t he?”

  You shake your head, impatient with what seems to you my willed innocence. “They have separate rooms,” you say, not looking at me, watching the door for Madeleine’s return. “Don’t you see what’s going on? Are you so totally oblivious?”

  Unwilling to understand the intensity of your concern, I nevertheless thank you for your trouble on my behalf just as Madeleine returns.

  “Your bed is made up,” Madeleine says, making a point of saying bonne nuit to your back as you leave.

  Madeleine’s room is not as large as I imagined it, but there is a six foot high Japanese-style screen between her plush queen-size bed (which she makes a point of showing me) and my austere single. A well-appointed private bathroom, which includes a bidet and double sinks with gleaming faucets, is on my side of the room.

  I wait a few minutes to let Madeleine use the bathroom, but when she doesn’t appear after about ten minutes I take my turn, following my usual routine except for the addition of a mild sleeping pill, and get into my cot, which is reassuringly comfortable. Your warning makes a brief appearance in my thoughts. Before I know it, before I can obsess about the difficulty I have falling asleep in other people’s beds, I have fallen asleep.

  I have fallen asleep.

  I have fallen asleep.

  The third of my dreams has to do with rescuing a woman in some historical movie (of indeterminate period) who I discover tied to a tree in the Bois de Boulogne. “Only a man pure of art has the power to free me,” she says.

  And yet I have been the one chosen to untie her. Is it possible that I have been mistaken for someone else and so arbitrarily put into a false role? I look for a sharp-edged stone to cut her bonds.

  The woman, who is dressed in tatters, laughs mockingly at my efforts. “If you are the right person, all you have to do is kiss the hem of my robe and my ropes will untie of their own accord.”

  I hesitate. Which of the tatters represents her robe, I wonder. “And what will happen if I am the wrong person?”

  “We will both die,” she says. “I hope you understand that I am speaking metaphorically.”

  How can I determine whether I am sufficiently pure of art, whatever that means. A kind of inertia or paralysis holds me as I try to assess the potential negative consequences of the good deed I am asked to perform—like what is a metaphorical death?—when I hear footsteps.

  “What the hell’s holding you back?” the woman says, then adds something in a language that is not one of mine.

  Is it possible to be aware of dreaming or is that an inherent contradiction? I find, unexpectedly, a Swiss Army knife in my right hand pocket and I use the first blade to release, which turns out to be a bottle opener, to cut the woman’s bonds, spilling the smallest possible amount of blood.

  She rubs her wrists, then puts her arms around my neck and mumbles in a grudging tone of voice something about being forever in my debt. “You have a kiss coming,” she says. “Where would you like it?”

  I am embarrassed to say what I want, and she laughs and says, “All right, dummy, then I’ll make the choice for you.” The next thing I know we are on the mossy ground together, rolling around, struggling for position.

  It is at this point I usually awake, but tonight the dream insists on playing itself out.

  When I open my eyes at first light, I am shivering and sweating, my covers in a sprawl on the floor next to the cot.

  I drag myself up to go to the bathroom, but the door is latched from the inside so I return to my cot. Exhausted, I try to go back to sleep—that is, I shut my eyes—but the urgencies of my bladder become the more crucial concern.

  So I put on the gray suit I wore at the wedding—my overnight case lost—and go off to find an unoccupied bathroom. The first two I try are, like my own, latched from within and I begin to consider other alternatives.

  Then I remember there being a closet with a toilet in it right off the kitchen and I work my way down two flights of stairs. In the dark, nothing seems quite like it was in the light. Somehow I manage to find myself inside the closetlike enclosure. With the door closed and latched against my back, there is barely room to stand.

  After peeing, I rub my hands against the sides of my pants, then comb my hair with my fingers. When I step out of the bathroom after a serious struggle with the latch, the light is on in the kitchen and Roget in his overcoat is sitting with his back to me, drinking coffee from a mug the size of a soup bowl.

  Looking over his shoulder to take my measure, he offers me a scornful smile.

  “Bonjour,” I say.

  “Ça va,” he says in return.

  The amenities out of the way, he finishes his coffee in silence.

  The coffeepot is one of those plunger types I have no idea how to use but I stumble around self-consciously opening cupboards. “Where does she keep the coffee?” I ask him.

  Roget seems not to hear me or perhaps not to understand the question.

  He is washing his coffee cup when you come into the kitchen and say something to him in French—the inflection suggests a question—which he answers, or seems to, without turning to look at you.

  Roget pushes open the side door, the door that comes off the kitchen, makes no attempt to button his coat, and disappears from the scene.

  You walk to the window and look out after him, tracking his progress, or so it seems.

  “What was that about?” I ask.

  You ignore my question, retreat to the table in a defeated posture, slump into the chair farthest from mine.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Absolutely not.” You keep your face turned away.

  I take sips of my coffee and wait my turn, my patience running thin as the coffee turns cold. After a while, after my cup is drained, I get up and announce that I am going back to my room.

  “Don’t you leave me too,” you say.

  “Did Roget leave you?” I ask. “The impression he gave me is that you asked him to go.”

  You raise your head momentarily. “Is that what he told you? Whatever, it comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? The fact is, he’s gone.”

  I sit down at the table, hon
oring your request, leaving an empty seat between us. After a moment, you take the seat next to me and put your head on my shoulder. And then I put my arm around you—where else can it go?—and your body stiffens almost imperceptibly.

  And that’s the way we are, trapped by the flashbulb of the imaginary onlooker’s imaginary camera, when Madeleine discovers us, sitting cheek to shoulder at the kitchen table.

  She makes a point of not looking directly at us, asks the room if anyone—we are the only two in the kitchen—would like some breakfast. She has, I notice, put her long gray hair in an over-elaborate bun, a designer chopstick seemingly holding it in place.

  “I almost never eat breakfast,” I say.

  You seem about to speak, but instead get up from the table, nod to me, and leave the room.

  “She knows I didn’t want her here,” Madeleine says. “It’s no trouble, you know, for me to make something for you. I’m one of those women who enjoys to challenge the kitchen. And so what are your plans for today? What would you like to do with your day?”

  I have no plans, which is to say I had planned to return home as soon as it seemed appropriate to leave. At the same time, I have a kind of anxious unobjectified foreboding. I want desperately to get out of the kitchen, but I am unable to come up with an acceptable excuse to take off.

  “Before you go,” Madeleine says, “there’s something I feel I should say. If you knew me better you would know this is not my style to criticize, but somebody, some friend should tell you this for your own good. I say this very reluctantly because I believe there is some good in her too. I suppose there is good in everybody, but who knows.”

  Then she goes on to tell me this extraordinary story about you, insisting on her reluctance to give out this information while of course giving it out in profusion. According to Madeleine, there is an unsolved mystery in your past, a former husband who died suddenly under, as she puts it, a dark cloud. Though nothing was ever proved, there were those who thought that you had arranged his murder, or possibly even committed the murder yourself.