When I arrive at the building on Stetson Street, when I finally get an elevator to take me to the ninth floor and present myself at the Alternate Therapies Office of Angelina Wooden and Associates, I am ten minutes late for my one-forty-five appointment.
The same male receptionist admits me, though seems not to remember me from yesterday. I mention that I am here for an appointment with Dr. Wooden.
“She’s not here,” he says. “Dr. Wooden does not come in on Tuesday afternoons.”
His news is disappointing, though not wholly unexpected. “She told me to come back today at 1:45,” I say, giving him my name, which he insists is not in his book.
I take a seat, suddenly aware of being tired. “I’ll wait,” I say.
“Didn’t I just tell you she won’t be in this afternoon? If you leave your name and phone number, I’ll see that it gets to her.”
I can’t explain why I ignore his request other than it seems important not to give in to him. I pick up a random magazine from the rack to my left and browse through the glossy pages.
I doze off, skip-reading an overheated article in a four-month-old Sports Illustrated about the otherwise unheralded importance of tight ends in the West Coast offense. When I open my eyes there are two cops standing over me, one of whom is the woman that rousted me from my vigil across the street. I look over at the receptionist, who refuses for obvious reasons to meet my glance.
My first impulse is to make a run for it. Instead, I get to my feet and move in virtual slow motion out the door to the elevator stand. The moment I ring for it, an elevator arrives, three people out of the five already ensconced making their unhurried departure. By the time I get inside the elevator, the two cops have also edged their way into the car.
The cop, who hadn’t spoken to me before, who is possibly also a woman—it is not wholly clear—cautions me to stay close when the elevator releases us.
There are five people waiting for us to exit, one of whom, the one in the back behind the hugely tall man, is you.
“They told me you weren’t coming in today,” I say as you stride by without looking in my direction on your way into the elevator.
“Oh hello,” you say, acknowledging me with a perplexed smile.
At the last possible instant, the door in the process of sliding shut, I force my way back into the elevator. (Always elevators in our story.) “Stop him,” a voice calls out, a woman’s voice, though it is possible that these are random sounds that I particularize gratuitously.
So think of us riding up together in this Art Deco elevator, standing side by side, several other passengers who may or may not be aware of our story standing about like extras in a movie to complete the picture.
By the time we reach the ninth floor, we are the only remaining passengers.
“The police are certain to be looking for you here,” she says as the door begins to open. “It would make more sense if you got off at the floor above.”
“You can tell them we have an appointment.”
“Why would I want to tell them that?”
“If I go to the tenth floor, will you come with me?”
“That’s not what I had in mind. I hope you’re not going to force me to do something I don’t want to do.”
That’s the moment it hits me that I’m a character in some collective soap-operatic melodrama, and to the local authorities and whoever else (you of course included), I’m a dangerous person. Since this perception will follow me whatever I do, I see no useful reason to disabuse you of it. “I think you’d better come with me,” I say, holding on to your arm until the elevator is in flight again.
An hour later, we are sitting on the third step of the stairwell between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors. You continue to insist that you don’t know me, have been aware of my presence only once before when I spoke to you outside of Ernesto’s, and that we did not (and do not) have an appointment for any time this afternoon.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” you say. “This is not meant to be disparaging but your behavior suggests that you’re more or less delusional. I can assure you that whoever you think I am, I am not that person.”
I offer some of the landmarks of our history together, the better times as they seemed to me, in the hope of moving you to some acknowledgment. “I wish I could help you,” you say carefully “but I can’t. Sorry. May I go now?”
As I see it, no one, not me certainly, least of all me, is keeping you from going wherever you want, but I’m not going to encourage you to leave me by informing you of your rights. “I’d prefer you stayed with me,” I say.
Our stalemate continues for awhile (I can’t say exactly how much time passes) and then you say, “What if I said that I did know you once, awhile back; if I did say as much, would you let me leave?”
I tend to be prepared for the unexpected—what else is there?—but it’s what I dare not hope for that generally takes me by surprise. “Well,” I say, “what exactly are you saying?”
“Do we have an agreement?”
“OK,” I say, giving nothing away. “Where were we the first time we met? Can you tell me that?”
You cover your face with your hands as if trying to envision something that refuses to come into focus. “In an elevator,” you say after some hesitation.
I refuse exhilaration, retain an uneasy calm. Possibly something I said gave you the clue you needed. “An elevator in what building? Where were you going at the time?”
“It was a party in New York City,” you say. “I can’t remember now whose party but I believe it was in an Upper West Side apartment. Is that your recollection?”
I may have mentioned in a recent conversation that we had a history of meeting in elevators and you filed the information away. “Is this a party trick you’re doing for my benefit?”
“If it is, I’m unaware of it. My memory has always been hit or miss and it’s gotten worse.”
“Did we talk at all at this party?”
“I don’t remember,” you say. “I don’t think we did.” You glance at me for confirmation.
My own memories are so variable, so undermined by internal contradictions that I find it hard to distinguish between what’s real if any memory is ever real and what’s invented for the sake of a more compelling story. Even so, your version of things is too close to my own story to be wholly trusted. In fact, the second time we met there was no indication that you even remembered that there had been a first.
“What happened in San Remy?” I ask.
The question seems to puzzle you. “What’s Sand Remy?” you ask.
“If you can tell me what happened in San Remy,” I say, “you are free to leave. By the way, it’s ‘San’ not ‘sand.’”
You again bury your face in your hands. “San Remy,” you say, testing the sound. “Could you give me some clues, some context?”
“No clues,” I say.
Several minutes pass or possibly hours, the waiting becoming increasingly burdensome. At some point, I decide to offer you the missing context. “It was at a wedding in Paris that we ran into each other after a long period of separation. I was there alone. You were there with some French guy, I believe. Somehow you had gotten your hands on the key to some cabin in San Remy—you may not have known the name of the town at the time—and after your boyfriend walked out, you invited me to go with you in his place. Do you remember any of this?”
“I ran into you at a wedding in France, is that right, at which my boyfriend and I broke up? And then, after the proceedings, we went together to this town you mention in the south of France.”
“And what happened between us during the two months or so we stayed together in the cabin outside San Remy?”
“I don’t know really. There are some images in my head, but I can’t make much sense of them.”
“Describe the images.”
You turn away, a sly smile on your face. “Did you bully me like this in San Remy?”
On three
separate occasions, there is some vaguely threatening activity just outside the stairwell and I expect each time that you will call for help but you make a point of being absolutely silent.
“On the contrary. When we began to get on each other’s nerves, you complained that I was too nice.”
You take me in, your eyes narrowed for just that purpose. “Whatever I might have meant by that,” you say. “It could be that you were trying too hard. Or that there was something about you or something about my feelings toward you that I found disturbing. This is total conjecture, you understand.”
“And what might you have done in such a situation, feeling as you did?”
“What would I have done? What do you mean by that? I don’t know what you mean. This is all theoretical, isn’t that right? … I would have, I don’t know, tried to get rid of you.”
“Get rid of me?”
“I’m impulsive. When I feel oppressed, I strike out. I would have, I don’t know, tried to get you out of my hair. I don’t remember any of this.”
“What would you have done to get rid of me?”
“I don’t remember any of this. It might have been you after all who left me. Or maybe I discovered that you were planning to leave. It’s painful to be left. And being excessively nice while being repellingly oppressive is a basic form of passive-aggressive hostility. At the very least, it asks for mistreatment in return. My feelings have always confused me as if they were in some language that seemed familiar but were in the most important ways untranslatable. I wanted you out of my life.”
“And?”
“It was you who ran away from me. Perhaps I did something that provoked you to leave.”
I get up from the step, my back stiff from the awkwardness of the position. “You’re free to go,” I say. “I’m satisfied.”
You continue to sit scrunched down on your step. “Are you sure?”
“This is the way it ends,” I say.
“With my going?”
“Yes.”
“And what if, for the sake of argument, I refuse to go? What if I decided to stay here with you or go back to New York with you and resume whatever it is we left unfinished? What if I said I loved you? Does that change everything?”
“What are you proposing?”
“Nothing real,” you say. “This is all conjecture.”
“This is all conjecture” is the last line of my novel. Now you are free to close the book and put it down on the end table next to your bed or slip it into the bookcase in the appropriate alphabetical spot. Even so, I’d be pleased, grateful really, if you held on to it a moment longer so even as we separate, the book, which is my other self, remains close to you, its final page unturned.
Photo by David Baumbach
Born in Brooklyn, Jonathan Baumbach, the son of a painter and father of a filmmaker, is the author of sixteen much-heralded books, including the much-heralded B, On the Way to My Father’s Funeral, D-Tours, Separate Hours, Reruns, Babble, The Life and Times of Major Fiction, A Man to Conjure With, and Dreams of Molly. His short stories have been widely anthologized, including O.Henry Prize Stories, All Our Secrets are the Same, and Best American Short Stories. He has written extensively on film and is a former chairman of the National Society of Film Critics. In 1973, Baumbach co-founded (with Peter Spielberg) Fiction Collection, the first national fiction writers cooperative in America (later reinvented as FC2). He has had cameo roles in all of his son Noah’s films.
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You, or the Invention of Memory Page 16