You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “I for one don’t believe she’s capable of murder,” Madeleine said, “no more than any of us, though for an American she’s extremely subtle. In any event, I like you too much not to let you know what you might be facing. I know with my own eyes that you are sweet on her so don’t deny it.”

  Later in the day, when you drive me to the airport, you ask in a casual voice if I had sex with Madeleine when I spent the night in her room.

  I don’t see that it is any of your business, which is what I don’t say or at least don’t say aloud. Instead I ask if it’s true that you had been married and widowed since the last time we ran into one another.

  “Well, did you or didn’t you?” you say.

  “Why do you care?” I ask.

  “That means you did, doesn’t it? What a helpless innocent you are. Frankly, I’m embarrassed on your behalf.”

  My suspicion is that the woman in the dream was Madeleine and that what happened between us extended beyond the dream. Nothing is certain, however. “You were married before or you weren’t, which is it?” I ask.

  We drive another twenty minutes in silence when I realize the road we are on is not going to Orly and ask, as anyone might in my position, for an explanation.

  “I was wondering when you’d notice,” you say. “There’s a totally charming cabin in Provence, isolated from virtually everything, that I’ve been invited to use. I was in no mood to go alone so I thought I’d kidnap you if you have no objections.”

  I look at my watch. My flight to JFK leaves Orly in an hour and fifteen minutes. “How far are we from the airport?” I ask.

  “Too far to walk,” you say. “Look, I promise you it will be different this time. If you prefer to go to the US by yourself to going to Provence with me, I’ll drive you to Orly. Deal? Either way, you have to tell me you didn’t sleep with my sister’s mother.”

  “I didn’t sleep with my sister’s mother, I mean your sister’s mother,” I say.

  “I don’t know whether to believe you,” you say. “Can I believe you? How can I? Do I even want to believe you? Do you even care whether I believe you or not?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d take me to the airport,” I say, a gesture at reclaiming some pretense of dignity.

  You pull over onto the apron and stop the car with a jolting screech. I expect you to ask me to get out of the car, which I plan to refuse, but instead you stare (or look blindly) ahead as if your image were paused, and say nothing for more time than I know what to do with.

  When I look at my watch you unfreeze long enough to glance in my direction. “It’s disgusting to always want to know the time,” you say. “If you live in the moment, you have no need of a watch.”

  It may be true that I almost never live in the moment, though I have always aspired to make the necessary adjustment. On the other hand, living in the moment does you no particular good when you have a flight to make.

  A police car pulls off the highway and stops about fifty feet behind us. A few minutes pass—it seems like no time at all—but no one emerges from the vehicle.

  “There’s some dope in the glove compartment,” you say. “When they stop you in France, they tend to search the car. I don’t know what will catch his attention more, rushing off or staying put.”

  “We’re probably better off returning to the highway,” I say.

  “You think?”

  “We’re less conspicuous as part of the general traffic, don’t you think?”

  “You make the decision.”

  “Let’s go,” I say and we pull back onto the highway, sliding in front of a paper goods truck that honks its horn at us.

  “Even when I was with others,” you say, “it’s always been you.”

  After a moment, I turn around to see if there’s anything to concern us coming up from behind.

  Years later, when we meet at a party given by people neither of us have met before, we go off together into the coatroom, which is also the master bedroom, and endeavor to catch up. At some point the discussion turns to the confusing events of our brief time together in San Remy.

  “It was kind of you to come with me,” you say. “I’m sorry I behaved like such a bitch. Look, I never wanted it to happen the way it did, but—I have to say it—you got on my nerves.”

  “Did I?”

  “It was all my fault I’m sure,” you say. “It was a difficult time for me as you know. A man I was crazy about, a man totally undeserving, dumped me.” We are sitting on the coats a foot or so apart and you offer me your hand.

  “I thought I was the one that owed you an apology,” I say.

  “You were always so nice to me,” you say. “Really, you were too nice—that was your problem. I’ve always had trouble getting on with men who were nice to me.”

  I have trouble reconciling the image of niceness with the sense of myself I carry away from that strange period in my life. “I behaved unconscionably in San Remy,” I insist.

  “Not at all,” you say. “I understand perfectly why you felt the need to get away.”

  “I should at least have left a note, some kind of explanation,” I say.

  “The fact of your absence was explanation enough. You realized I was putting minute doses of poison in your food. I understood that. Why wouldn’t you run away? I just wonder you had enough strength to walk by yourself to the next town.”

  “I left you the car because I was sort of hoping you’d come after me,” I say.

  You retrieve your hand and use it along with the other to cover your face. “I can’t believe you wanted me to come after you. Why would you? Why would you possibly?”

  For a moment I let the conversation die, feeling with some desperation the need to get away, the need to escape further explanation. When I fled the cabin in San Remy, as I recall, I had been feeling a little weak in the legs, a light sweat on my forehead, my stomach in minor turmoil. All pretense. The illness was just a ruse on my part to throw you off—I didn’t want to have to explain my need to be on my own. I had so thoroughly internalized my sense of being desperately ill, my body accepted the implications as though they were real. I even collapsed a few times while running.

  “I just wanted to see how far I could take it,” you say, your hands still over your face. “You may not want to believe this, but I never intended to go all the way. I want you to believe that. I really do.”

  I get up from the bed, leaving my coat somewhere in the pile, and edging my way through the crowd, nodding to the woman I had exchanged smiles with earlier in the evening, exit the party, summon the elevator and, without waiting for its arrival, scramble down nine flights to the lobby and then into the street, crossing my arms in front of me as a stay against the shock of the night air.

  For the first block or so, I walk briskly, but then as I near the subway, I slow down as if all this desperate hurrying had tired me out. In fact, I avoid going into the subway and continue to walk downtown perhaps to the next stop, which is eighteen blocks away, the streets quiet, almost deserted at this time of night. The moon in a crescent phase misted over, offering a suspicion of light as if coming from behind a closed door.

  I must have walked fifteen blocks in all when I glance behind me for the first time and see, or imagine I see, some incalculable distance away, a shadow figure running toward me, holding up something, some offering, a coat perhaps or some kind of oddly shaped weapon. Deciphering my perception costs me no more than a moment or two. And then of course I pick up my stride, continue on my way, my urgency unabated, but like in a dream I suddenly feel the poison flash through my veins, the microscopic doses retarding my progress in imperceptible ways and I sense that before long, before I reach the entrance to the next station of the subway—this is a recurrent unfinished scenario—I will be caught by whomever it is coming up behind me (it is always you) prepared to accept whatever comes next.

  SIX

  ___

  I remember a time (in a dream perhaps) when we ran toward each othe
r on a crowded city street and came together—we were mocking the conventions of a certain kind of romantic film—in a rather cautious, disappointing hug. You insist it never happened, though the memory remains remarkably vivid.

  “If I met you again after years of not seeing you, it would be the same between us as it is now,” you say. “People don’t change. Even as I get older to others, to myself I always remain the same.”

  It is possible that I’m putting words in your mouth.

  You had asked me to meet you at the Brass Bar, a place we used to hang out at when we both drank to tell me something you couldn’t or wouldn’t relay over the phone.

  The mystery of your news has piqued my curiosity to the point that I’ve already imagined three possible alternate scenarios.

  In scenario one you tell me that you’ve decided to move in with our mutual friend, Roger, and you wanted me to hear it from you first. It is a trial arrangement, you say, hardly permanent, but you both hope (and why wouldn’t you?) that it will be a successful trial. And that you’d like to have my blessings to accompany you on this precipitous and somewhat frightening step.

  In scenario two you tell me that you have just learned that you are, as all the signs indicated, pregnant and you would appreciate it greatly if I would accompany you to an abortion clinic as moral support. I do not ask whose child it might be and you do not volunteer the information. I do not have to be a mathematician to know that it is not mine.

  In scenario three, you tell me that you woke up this morning with the inescapable sense that it was possible that you were in love with me and had been avoiding my company for the past several months as a form of denial. You were eager, anxious even, to get my response to your news in person so you would have a better sense of how to proceed.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I say.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Do you want the polite answer or the one I’ll regret afterward?”

  “I can understand,” you say, “how this might be difficult for you to accept. It’s not my intention to hurt you. It’s never been my intention to hurt you. I just want us, the three of us, if at all possible, to remain friends.”

  “I asked you because I didn’t know who else to ask. I think you understand what I’m saying.”

  “I can understand your distrust. I distrust myself as much as you distrust me. Still, I hope I’m being sincere.”

  I reject the first several invitations to come to dinner before yielding to your relentless campaign to keep me in the picture. Even so, I arrive forty minutes late, which I know without being told is a form of hostility. To cover my tracks, I bring over an expensive bottle of wine, a young Medoc not quite ready to drink.

  After you go into the operating room—we have nothing or too much to say to each other on the way over, which is the same thing—the receptionist asks me if “your wife” had anything to eat in the past three hours or so. Since I’ve only been with you for the past thirty-five minutes, it is not a question I am equipped to answer. “What would happen if she had eaten within three hours?” I ask. “You never know,” the receptionist says. “It could be dangerous.” “Won’t the doctor ask her?” “That’s my job,” she says. “I’m supposed to check that out before I let them in to see the doctor. In your wife’s case I don’t know what I was thinking, but I let her get by without asking the question.”

  As it turns out, I’m not the only one invited to dinner. There is another couple, who I meet at the door going in, and a single woman, Roger’s much younger half-sister, who (I believe, unless I have that wrong) has just come over from England and is staying with the two of you until she can find a place of her own. I hand Roger the bottle of wine I’ve brought, for which he thanks me effusively while glancing disparagingly at the label. “I know next to nothing about continental wines,” he says.

  You make a show of being disappointed (perhaps that’s unfair on my part) at my muted reaction to your news, and after that to your superfluous avowal of sincerity. I’m not sure what you expected. Was I supposed to leap in the air with unbridled delight. “What brought about this discovery?” I ask.

  On my left at table is the unattached woman, Elizabeth, and on my right is the female half of the other couple whose name—something starting with an F—I never quite get. Elizabeth tends to silence except to answer questions, and even then offers no more than a few words, words painstakingly chosen to avoid so much as a hint of intimate revelation. On the other hand, F has a lot to say, much of it the most banal form of chatter.

  “You can’t go in there,” the receptionist says, but I do. It is like the primal dream of walking into your parents’ bedroom and discovering them in the sexual act.

  You have made an uncharacteristically elaborate meal and we are into the third or fourth course, which consists of a pork chop nesting in an apple-cranberry puree, when Elizabeth makes her first unsolicited remarks. “You don’t like my brother much, do you?” she says.

  My off-limits presence causes a collective hypersonic groan, the dust forming skeletal exclamation points on the white walls. You are the only one to speak words. “Get out of here,” you say. “When did you eat last?” I ask. “Please leave,” you say. “Can’t you see you’re not wanted here.” “It’s dangerous unless more than three hours have elapsed,” I say. “Please,” you say. “We’ll talk about this later.”

  I had no sense of Elizabeth’s presence—I couldn’t even have described her if somebody had blindfolded me on the spot—until she makes the accusation concerning her brother in this small childlike voice, every word enunciated with equal stress. That’s when I turn to take her in, confronted by the fierce intelligence in her face. I had been planning to deny her assertion, but I can see immediately the pointlessness of lying to her. “It has nothing to do with your brother,” I say.

  Elizabeth returns her attention to her food. I notice that you are watching us with this troubled look on your face. “There’s a little piece of heaven on my plate,” F announces to no one in particular.

  It’s not that I think you’re being insincere—well it is and it isn’t—or not that so much as that your so-called revelation could easily be rescinded tomorrow or the day after that or even in the next hour by an opposing self-discovery. “Of course I’m pleased to hear it,” I say in this grim voice that causes you to laugh. “When I look at you now,” you say, “I begin to wonder who I thought I was thinking of when I told myself I loved you.”

  “It’s all right,” Elizabeth whispers, “I don’t much like him either.” When I laugh nervously at Elizabeth’s remark, I catch you glaring at me. F says, turning away from Roger with whom she’d been discussing some movie neither of them had seen, “I’m just wild for the taste of dill. If it were up to me, it would be included in every dish. Do you know what I mean?” I nod, or don’t, trying to remember (did I ever know?) what signifies the taste of dill. “Then why are you staying in their house?” I ask Elizabeth.

  The doctor holds his scalpel, or whatever instrument it is, poised in the air as if it were a conductor’s baton, as I back out the door. “Sorry, I interrupted,” I say. “I was worried.” “Everything’s under control,” the nurse says, holding a hypodermic needle behind her back.

  A waitress comes by and we each order the house pale ale. “This was not an easy confession to make,” you say between sips. “And I have to say you’ve not made it any easier. What do you want to do?” “What do you want to do?” I ask. “Where do you want to take this?” “Since you ask, sweetheart, there’s a movie starting at 7:40 at the Angelica that I’d like to catch.”

  A half hour later you emerge from the operating room, huddled over, the nurse a half-step behind you. “Would you like a wheelchair?” she asks you. You shake your head in this weary way, but then the nurse asks the question again. I get up from my molded plastic chair and meet you halfway, offering you a hand which you refuse.

  Roger holds up his wineglass and takes a sip before
offering a toast: “To a joyous occasion made all the more joyous by having good friends around to share it with.” Oddly, no one else raises a glass except the man who is with F and whose name is either Heinz or Hans or something else altogether different. You pour yourself a glass of seltzer and, after looking around the table at the non-participating guests, join the toast. Eventually F follows suit, leaving only Roger’s sister and the narrator of our story with our glasses conspicuously not uplifted. “Well, you two,” Roger says. “To the chef,” I say, lifting my glass. “To the chef,” Roger echoes and we sip from our glasses with relative synchronicity. “Traitor,” Elizabeth whispers or perhaps I imagine it, not bothering to look in her direction until the toast is put to rest.

  I come around to your side of the car to help you out. “Don’t bother,” you say, but you teeter when you walk so I accompany you in the elevator to your apartment, which is on the ninth floor. You unlock the door and I help you in, my arm around your waist, and you say, “Thank you, but I really don’t need your help; I really don’t.” I stand around awkwardly, watching you bounce off the door as you lurch into the bedroom. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” I ask and get no answer. I pace the living room, consider going home, but end up sitting down in your not-quite-comfortable easy chair.

  After the meat course, there is a second salad course—a puff of unidentifiable greens (perhaps arugula) circled by tangerine slices—and Roger makes a joke about no one being able to get up from the table after the dinner is finished to which you take exception. “I just wanted to do something elegant,” you say, “something in the grand manner. This is the menu, or as close to it as I could get with local provisions, that a wife of one of the Russian tsars made for her husband before she had him killed. I’m sorry if it doesn’t meet with your approval.”