“Time heals,” Jay said, “and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Lois cut in just as Jay was completing his sentence. “My policy is to ignore problems and hope they go away,” she said.
“When I feel wronged, I can be absolutely unforgiving,” Jay said, “and it’s possible that Jay has been burned too much to be willing to risk making a gesture he knows will be scorned.”
Lois pursed her lips. “I guess when the going’s tough, I don’t have much backbone, do I?”
Jay picked up a flyer that had been lying on the table and folded it into a paper airplane.
Leo’s bearded face showed a minor crack of concern and he suggested after Jay had launched the paper airplane in Lois’s direction and Lois had stared daggers at Jay in return that it might be a good idea to stop the role playing at this point and return to their former selves. “I’ll give you a few minutes to get back into your own heads.”
“This was useful,” Lois said. “When he was going on about me being hypercritical and unforgiving, I got the impression he was really talking about himself. I learned something from that.”
“Hey, weren’t we both talking about ourselves?” Jay said.
“You’re so clever,” she said. “Why hadn’t I ever noticed that before?”
“You’re the princess of snide,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry I threw the plane in your direction. It wasn’t really meant to hit you, it was to make you aware there was someone else in the room.”
“You never say anything that means anything,” she said. “Why is that? You are the prince of self-justifying incoherence.”
Jay got out of his chair with apparent difficulty as if fighting some kind of invisible resistance, and retrieved his coat.
“Why don’t you just leave?” Lois said.
Leo turned his head just enough to glance at the clock on the wall. “We still have some time left, people,” he said.
FOURTH SESSION
There is no record of a fourth session.
PART
III
___
ELEVEN
___
After our fourth and final breakup, six years and nine months pass uneventfully before I run into you again.
During this prolonged separation, I make little or no attempt to get back together with you or even to see you on other terms, or rather whatever limited attempt I make to see you is made without urgency or passion or rather my urgency is worked up, a way of convincing myself of feelings that may no longer exist. The motor of habit ran my train and when it broke down my pursuit of you accordingly stopped in its tracks.
If we are ever to get back together, I tell myself—you see I do occasionally reconsider the unthinkable—it will have to be as if we were both different people. It is not that I woke up one morning no longer in love with you as that I consciously, willfully, put my romantic longings aside and chose to live in the prosaic real world. In the past when we separated it had seemed to me part of some larger unintelligible process working toward some transcendent reconciliation.
My childlike father used to tell me—it was as if I was eavesdropping on a conversation he was having with himself—that maturity meant no more than the ability to accept things as they are. So in order to pass as an adult in the world’s collective imagination, I acknowledge that it is over between us. We are done, burned out, canceled, history, finis, a page irrevocably turned. That’s my passing-for-an-adult mantra.
So, outside of dreams, which I can’t control, you no longer exist for me. (That is, you didn’t exist until I started to write this novel in which you persistently disappear only to reemerge.) There are two ways to look at it. I’m either trying to win you back or to exorcise the tidal pull of my feelings for you forever. I can’t help but wonder—it is an essential part of the game—if you’re reading these words. I imagine that you are, which is next door to, or at least down the street from, to the same thing.
Let’s start this section again.
Four and a half years have passed since our fourth and theoretically final breakup and I am in San Francisco to give a reading—actually a series of readings—from my novel in progress. I go out to dinner with my host and his wife at an old-fashioned plush Victorian-style restaurant, an old standby which has recently come back into favor. During the dessert course, I take a break and visit the men’s room in the hope of recovering sufficient appetite to contend with the tarte tatin awaiting me at my abandoned place.
That’s the setting—plush restaurant in downtown San Francisco—for your next unanticipated appearance in my life. As I step out of the men’s room, focused on my apple tart, a woman who bears you more than a circumstantial resemblance has just emerged from the facing bathroom. It is clearly you—I recognize you from the back of your head, I’d know you anywhere—though of course it can’t really be you. You’re on the East Coast, working as an editor for a trendy monthly journal called The Magazine.
I watch whoever it is return to her table and the profile she shows on sitting—the partial profile—is close enough to yours to produce a disturbing frisson. You are with another woman, someone I’ve never seen before, and I observe the two of you in conversation before returning to my untasted dessert and a brandy my hosts have ordered for me in my absence.
When we exit the restaurant a half hour later, you and your companion have already gone, but then I notice you on the street waiting by yourself for a cab. I make my excuses and separate from my hosts, not sure yet what I intend. Before I can reach you, you give up your vigil and walk off in an abstracted, daydreamy way. The choice makes itself. I decide to follow in your tracks at an unobserved distance.
My discreet pursuit goes on for longer than I had any reason to anticipate and in a direction virtually opposite that of my hotel.
It is as if you can sense my presence. At some point, you stop abruptly and turn toward me.
As I approach, you look around warily to see if anyone else is within call.
“Have you been following me?” you ask, reading my face without recognition in the shadowy light.
“I was planning to say hello,” I say.
You take a wary step closer. “Hello? Why would you say hello to me? Do we know each other?”
For a moment, I’m willing to believe that I’ve made a mistake, but apart from the hair styling, it’s hard to imagine that there is another person on the planet that looks so much like you. “You look almost exactly like someone I know,” I say.
“Uh huh,” you say and we walk along together in your direction. “This isn’t some kind of pick up line you use, is it? Some alternate version of ‘Haven’t I seen you someplace before’?”
“How long have you been living in San Francisco?” I ask.
“Doesn’t matter,” you say. “I promise you I’m not who you think I am.”
“But if you’re not, how do you know who I think you are?”
When we get to Eureka Street, you stop. I hold out my hand, which you ignore. “I’ll say goodbye here,” you say.
“I’d like to see you again,” I say. “Would that be possible?”
You offer a skeptical smile, which I don’t pretend to understand. “I don’t know,” you say.
“Look,” I say, “I’d like to take you to dinner. It would make me happy to take you to dinner.”
The odd smile makes a second appearance. “I don’t know you well enough,” you say, “to be concerned about your happiness one way or another. I don’t mean that to be as harsh as it may sound. This just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
I tell myself to walk away but obsession takes charge and I say, or rather hear myself say—my intention insofar as I allow myself one not to plead—“Please.”
You turn your back on me. “Sorry,” you say and wait for me to disappear before moving on to your residence, which is in a green frame house on the corner at the far end of the block. For now, it is enough for me to know where you are hiding out.
Early the n
ext morning, I take a cab from my hotel room—I thought of renting a car but street parking is difficult in San Francisco—and get dropped off a block past your street. I don’t want you to think I’m stalking you so I station myself as far from your building as possible while still having an unobstructed view of your front door. At 9:33 you come out of your building—a man and a woman had preceded you—and you start walking almost directly toward me. I have no choice but to duck into an alleyway to avoid being discovered. When I return to the street you are nowhere to be seen. I can see that I’ve managed this badly.
I go into the anteroom of your building and note that there are three apartments. I write down the names, Wooden, Margolis, Titianni—names that mean nothing to me—in a notebook and return to my hotel.
That evening, I give a reading in a hip independent bookstore and in the audience, an almost unacceptable coincidence, is the woman you were with the previous night in the restaurant.
To extend the coincidence, the woman you were with approaches after the reading with a copy of one of my books to be signed. It is almost—take this lightly if you will—as if fate is offering me another opportunity. “Who should I sign the book to?” I ask. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Just sign it.” I look up at her as I return the signed book. “You know, I think I’ve seen you before,” I say. “Is that right? Where would that have been?” “You were having dinner at Ernesto’s sometime after nine last night in the company of another woman.” “And you noticed us? I’m flattered or at least I suppose I should be.” There is something edgy about her that doesn’t ingratiate, but I nevertheless invite her for a drink in the high end café next door, an offer she neither accepts nor declines. When, eventually, the line of buyers uses itself up, she is standing by the door in her coat, waiting for me.
In the course of asking your apparent friend about herself, I manage to slip in a few questions concerning her companion, who I continue to assume is you. While A—the initial on the pocket of her blazer—nurses a peach margarita and matches my evasiveness with her own, I drink fizzy water with a slice of desiccated lime attached to the glass like a name tag. There exists what might be called a mutual dis-empathy between us.
“She’s a recent friend,” she says, “though not a close friend, a coworker with whom I share certain sympathies. We’ve only known each other a short time. Our eating together, well it has to do with a bet, the circumstances of which you don’t want to hear about.”
“What is it you both do?” I ask.
“Why is it I have the feeling you have an ulterior agenda?” she says. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want to know and I’ll decide whether I want to give you that information or not. OK?”
I make a quick decision, regretting my lack of discretion even as I confess to A that my interest in her friend, in you, comes from an uncanny resemblance she has to someone I’ve known.
“And you want to know whether my friend is who you think she is?”
“Will you help me?”
“For one, I don’t know if I can. And for two, I don’t know you well enough to know what you’ll do with the information once you have it.”
“I’m not sure myself what I want,” I say. “I had no interest in seeing her again until, in fact, purely by chance, I saw her again. And now I don’t want to let her out of my sight.”
“What you’re telling me is that you’re behaving compulsively. That’s not the best recommendation to earn my trust. I think I’d better go now.”
“Look, you have my book. I’ve been completely honest about my understanding of what’s going on. So you know something about me. On the other hand, you’ve given me nothing back. If you can assure me that your friend has been out here for more than six years and therefore cannot be the woman I think she is, I promise to walk away.”
“I wish I could,” she says. “Believe me, if I could give you that assurance, I would. The problem is, the very real problem is, that I suspect that my friend, as you call her, is probably the person you think she is. I am in no position to say more than that.”
That’s her exit line and I sit inertly by as she leaves the café. When she is gone, I notice that she has dropped or left behind a business card, which I retrieve from under her chair.
The card reads as follows:
ANGELINA WOODEN, PSYCHOTHERAPIST
Sanity is my business.
Group sessions. Alternate Therapies. Private consultations. Insurance accepted.
401-246 1130
I am scheduled to return to New York City the next morning and I call the airline to change my reservation to the following Monday. Later in the day, I call Angelina Wooden at the number on her misplaced card, speak to someone else, a receptionist possibly—the voice oddly familiar—and make an appointment to come in for a consultation at three-fifteen the next day.
I’m acting on the possibly false assumption that the card was left for me intentionally.
If the two of you work together, there’s the chance anyway that I’ll run into you or at least learn more about what’s going on at Angelina’s place of business.
Though I’m open to being surprised, what happens next has little to do with the surprise I allow myself to anticipate.
The receptionist, a young man, keeps me waiting in the impersonal anteroom for no apparent reason—I am on time, I am the only one there—before sending me in to the therapist’s office. The first surprise is that the woman behind the closed door is not the person I had coffee with after my bookstore signing.
The second surprise is that the therapist awaiting my entrance, making notations in a leather-bound appointment book on the desk in front of her—the two surprises are virtually simultaneous—is the woman that resembles you.
I wait in vain for you to recognize me before speaking. “How are you today?” you say, looking directly at me, giving nothing away.
“Are you sitting in for Dr. Wooden today?” I ask.
My question seems to amuse you. “Why would you think that? Who do you think I am?”
“I think you’re whoever you say you are,” I say.
“For both our sakes, I hope so too,” you say. “And what’s your story?”
Unsure of where to take this unacceptable exchange, I answer your question by reciting a version of the plotline of my novel.
“I am a man who is obsessed with a woman who has been in and out of his life in a variety of contexts, a woman he imagines he loves, a woman to whom he is addressing a letter in the form of a novel with some hidden purpose in mind that he has yet to understand and hopes to have revealed to him through the process of the telling.”
“The thing is, with obsessive people,” you say, “while they believe they’re giving away their innermost secrets, they’re really telling you next to nothing about themselves. I think we should pursue this. If you can come in tomorrow at one forty-five, I can give you a full session.” You make a notation in your book as if I had already agreed to your terms.
I try unsuccessfully to see what you have written in the appointment book. “Will you be here tomorrow if I come back?” I ask.
You laugh at that in a way that seems rehearsed. “The only way to find out,” you say, “is to show up.”
There have been times—I admit this freely—when I’ve had difficulty distinguishing between dream reality and whatever else there is. I stay up much of the night trying to piece together into some kind of useable order the events I’ve just described. And the question that I keep coming back to, the inadvertently inescapable question, is what do you think is going on? Just who do you think I am?
The next day I arrive more than an hour early for my appointment and park at a diagonal across the street from your building, hunkered down in my car like a private detective, though with a notable difference. I am hoping to discover something that I don’t know, that I’m not clever enough to know, that I’m looking for. No one enters or leaves the building during this first period of my vigil. The b
lare of a horn distracts me. A police car is parked alongside me without my being aware of its having arrived. The policewoman sitting next to the driver instructs me through gesture to roll down the window, which I do.
“Good morning, sir,” she says, leaning out her own opened window and waits for me to acknowledge her before getting down to business. “Sir, what are you doing here?”
“Killing time,” I say. “I’m early for an appointment.”
“I have no problem with that,” she says. “Sir, this is a ‘No Standing’ zone so I’m going to have to ask you to move along.”
At that moment, I notice two women exit the building, one of whom might be you. The police car, which obstructs my view, makes the identification uncertain.
I offer what I hope is an ingratiating smile. “I’ll be gone in a few minutes,” I say.
“Sir, I’m afraid you’ll have to move now,” she says. “As my chief likes to say, ‘The law waits on no man.’ There’s no reason not to tell you this. We’ve had a complaint about you. It’s in your best interest to move along, especially if your reasons for being here are as innocent as you make out.”
“Can you tell me the source of the complaint?” I say.
The head, that had briefly retracted, returns out the window. “Sir, don’t you know when someone is doing you a favor? Get the fuck out of here.”
As soon as I start up the motor, the police car backs up, giving me another open look at the building. A stream of people seem to be exiting, the lunch crowd perhaps.
When I drive off, I pick up the police car in the rearview mirror, moseying along behind me. It may or may not follow me in to the multi-level underground parking garage three blocks away.
I park the car on the cusp between level 8A and 8B—the first available space—and take a crowded elevator up to the street floor, my journey interrupted by multiple stops, the foul air circulated by a small ceiling fan that makes a whining noise with every revolution.
You, or the Invention of Memory Page 15