You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  Even as the tears continued to fall, you put a finger over your lips to silence me.

  Annoyed at your rebuke, distracted from the ceremony, I turned away, but then I found myself glancing at you again. You had the kind of charismatic presence certain film actors have only in front of the camera. For the moment, I was your camera and I was so entranced by your charm I didn’t hear a word of Genevieve’s statement. Even when I looked elsewhere, anywhere else, you were there, your shimmering aura in my mind’s eye.

  “I’m in love,” I remember saying to myself, a joke really because I would not allow myself to believe it, exorcising the demon before it took hold. The translation of my feelings seemed to pass through three or four obscure languages. “I want to be with her” was the only message I allowed myself.

  “She’s taken,” I was later told by Josh’s mother who had come up to me after the ceremony. “She’s living with someone, a man named Roger, I’m told.”

  And I had not even asked at that point. Was there something in my face that conveyed the question?

  That they all seemed to know I was pursuing you made it somehow easier as if it wasn’t my choice to behave badly, merely the nature of the character I had been assigned to play.

  “You nearly drowned us all in there,” I said to you, looking for something to say.

  You laughed, which was a generous response to an awkward remark, and it gave me a rush of pleasure. “Don’t you know when a woman cries at a wedding, you’re supposed to look the other way,” you said. “I have this way of identifying with all the participants at these affairs—bride, groom, maid of honor, caterers, mothers, former lovers.”

  “Hey, and there I was identifying with you when you were crying,” I said.

  You squeezed my arm, our first intimacy. “You weren’t really, were you?” you said. “You weren’t … If you were, you wouldn’t have asked if I was all right.”

  I managed by switching the table cards to sit next to you during the dinner, and we hung out together, even danced a couple of times at the reception that followed.

  Afterwards, expecting to be turned down, I invited you as casually as fear of rejection allowed to go out with me for a nightcap. You looked behind you to see who might be listening before saying, “Sounds good,” punctuated by a sassy laugh. The fact of the live-in boyfriend had come up earlier, reference to his being in Chicago on business, though no mention had been made of him since that initial establishing of your unavailability.

  A rapport had been struck between us, a kind of misleading ease, and I remember the flickering self-protective thought that this was just an idle flirtation, that in all likelihood nothing was going to happen between us.

  “You look very much the same,” you say

  “Why don’t we go some place we can talk,” I say. “There’s a Starbucks around the corner, I believe.”

  “There’s a Starbucks around every corner,” you say. “Anyway, my husband will be here in about five minutes to pick me up.”

  “Is the husband you’re meeting the guy, what’s his name, Roger, the guy you were with when we met?”

  “My husband’s name is Tom,” you say.

  “Whatever happened to what’s his name … Roger?”

  “Whatever happened happened. Obviously we moved out of each others’ lives. That was twenty-seven years ago. I have trouble remembering what happened last week.”

  “Hey, I hung out by the phone for months, gave up eating and sleeping, hoping to hear you had broken with Roger.”

  “Hey yourself,” you say. “You didn’t. You know you didn’t. I suppose I assumed you had also moved on. Or maybe there was something about you that scared me.”

  At that point, my agent, Marianna Dodson, intrudes, appropriates my arm, announcing that there is someone interesting she wants me to meet.

  “I’m meeting someone interesting now,” I say, introducing you, though it appears you already know each other.

  “We can talk later,” you say.

  I let myself be led away, and in another room I am introduced to an editor who has just been rewarded with her own imprint and is looking, so Marianna whispers in my ear, for something important to launch her list.

  “I really liked your early stuff,” the editor tells me. “The book you wrote about the First World War, what was the name of it again, it stayed with me for the longest time. If you have something like that on the way, I’d love to have the opportunity to look at it.”

  I am working on a novel that I still don’t understand about the lost memory of an event that may or may not have ever taken place, and it seems somewhere between a year and forever away from completion. So as not to embarrass Marianna, I thank the editor for her interest and promise to think of her when the book is ready to show.

  All of that takes ten minutes and I move on under the guise of getting myself another glass of champagne, retracing my steps to see if you are still around. You are not where you were.

  I escape from another conversation, discard the champagne I hadn’t really wanted and I wander through the adjoining two rooms, assuming with more annoyance than regret that the husband I continue to think of as Roger has come for you and you have returned to the life you have been living for almost thirty years without me.

  I make an effort to talk to other people while glancing around whatever room I am in in the vain hope that you will mysteriously reappear.

  The Village bar I took you to was predictably noisy and I suggested we move on to my apartment which was only a few blocks away. When we got to the door of my building—we had been holding hands as we walked—you stopped me and said, “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”

  “What do you suggest?” I remember myself saying, resigned to the evening’s uneventful conclusion.

  “I should get home,” you said. “Well, since we’re here, I’ll have one last drink for the road, then catch a cab.”

  As soon as we stepped inside my apartment, you leaned into me and we kissed fiercely, rattling against the door which had not yet fully closed.

  It embarrassed me that my bed was unmade, but you didn’t seem to mind and afterward when you did bring it up it became an edgy joke between us.

  We were both besotted, as I remember it, and our lovemaking was oddly dreamlike as if we were watching two other people go at it with a kind of desperation offering itself as passion.

  When you were no longer in my bed, I felt an unreasonable sense of loss.

  My comprehension of the world when I was in my 20’s tended to be self-involved. You wouldn’t have made love to me with such abandon, I told myself (though possibly abandon was the wrong word) if you were in love with Roger. I repeated this willed perception to myself like a mantra until it seemed undeniable.

  Unable to hold out, I called you at work the next day, foraging the number from the phone book. When I finally reached you, you sounded skittish, said it wasn’t a good time to talk, that you would get back to me later in the week.

  Two days passed without a return call and I called again, suggesting that we meet for a drink after work. “I can’t,” you said, then added, “I don’t want to hurt Roger; can you understand?”

  I spent hours replaying your response in my head, analyzing its implications. Your remark about not wanting to hurt Roger meant, as I understood it, that I was the one you really cared about. My confidence rose and fell and rose again like stock market quotes in a shaky season.

  I composed a note, which I mailed to you at work, regretting its excesses as soon as the mailbox stole it from my hand.

  “…” I wrote, “you remain with me like internal weather. Tell me you feel nothing for me and I won’t bother you again.”

  “I can’t tell you that,” you wrote back. And the day after that, I got a note from you saying, “This is hard for me too.”

  You come up to me from nowhere as if you had materialized from smoke. “It was good running into you again,” you say, smiling your apologetically iron
ic smile.

  “Oh I thought you had gone,” I say, on the far side of disappointed.

  “As you can see, I’m still here,” you say.

  “Look,” I say, “why didn’t you call me when you broke up with Roger?”

  A rumpled white-haired man appears and you introduce him as your husband, Tom. There is something familiar about him, though I don’t remember the particulars of any previous encounter.

  “Are you about ready to go?” Tom asks you. “This seems more like a wake than a party, doesn’t it?”

  “About ready,” you say. “Getting there.”

  “I’ll get myself a glass of something,” Tom says, and moves off toward the back room where an assistant editor or intern is serving the California champagne.

  For a moment, we have nothing to say to each other. “I’m sorry about all the questions,” I say to fill the silence. “When I get obsessive about something, I have difficulty letting it go.”

  “If you like, we could meet for lunch some time,” you say. You take a card from your purse and slip it into my jacket pocket like a magician’s trick…“Call me, and we’ll arrange something. Friends tell me I’m hard to reach so don’t get discouraged.”

  You had stopped returning my calls and you hadn’t answered the last two of my notes. What could I say or do, or not do, that would get you to see me again? There had to be something and I was mostly confident that eventually I would figure out what that elusive something was.

  You were an honorable person, I told myself, or aspired to be (as I was myself, at least in theory), who wouldn’t betray a commitment (a second time) unless you were prepared (as I half-hoped) to break with Roger altogether.

  Though full of myself then, I had a way of inventing negative scenarios that protected me from the risk of rejection. What if, I worried, you broke up with Roger over me and you and I got together and, as happens, what seemed like love turned out to be something considerably less enduring. I would feel responsible, I would be responsible, for messing up your life.

  Still, said the other side in the in-head debate, if you didn’t love Roger (and I had to believe you didn’t), wouldn’t I be doing you a service by extricating you from a relationship that could only lead to grief?

  Desperate to see you again, I finally decided, after rejecting the idea several times, that the only way to make my case effectively was to risk waiting for you after work.

  We meet for lunch in an out of the way Vietnamese restaurant in the East Village. You are already there when I arrive, reading a book to pass the time, looking as self-possessed as ever. Before I sit down across from you, we acknowledge the occasion by shaking hands like diplomats from hostile countries.

  After we order, you say, “I have a favor to ask of you. Could we not talk about the past?”

  What is there between us if not the past? “Why did you suggest we get together for lunch?”

  You let my question hang in the air for a while before answering. “Why do you think?” you say.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t have asked,” I say. “It must be as obvious to you as it is to me that our lives have gone in very different directions.”

  “I don’t agree,” you say. “It means something, it has to, that after all these years we run into each other again.”

  “If that means something,” I say, “then what does it mean that we haven’t run into each other before?”

  “I’ve spent at least half of the last twenty-five years abroad,” you say, as if that settled the matter.

  “Doing what?”

  “Never mind,” you say. “I’m a little embarrassed to say what I came here to say because I have no idea how you’re going to take it.”

  “Have you been married before?” I ask.

  “It doesn’t matter,” you say.

  “Everything matters,” I say. “I give you my word that nothing you tell me in confidence will appear in my novel.”

  Again silence. “Look, there’s really nothing to tell,” you say. “I do some charity work. I’m on the board of a few cultural organizations and such. I’m one of those people with a bad conscience who does what she can to make herself useful. Since Tom’s job brought us back to the States, I’ve begun painting again, which is important to me. Is that what you want to know? If we’re going to be friends, you’re going to have to respect that I don’t like to talk about things that no longer matter. Roger, who seems to concern you more than he does me, is very old news, barely a footnote in my life. The only thing that matters, I’ve come to believe, is what happens next. Does that make sense to you?”

  It doesn’t, but I’m not prepared to say so. “OK,” I say. “What happens next?”

  I waited more than two hours for you in a persistent drizzle to come out of work. In retrospect, an embarrassing admission. It seemed noble somehow—I was hoping to impress you with my steadfastness—not to seek cover. For whatever reason, you didn’t appear. Perhaps you had stayed home from work that day. Perhaps you had seen me from the window and gone out the back way. Anyway, I was soaked and shivering when I got home and I felt foolish and angry and more than a little sorry for myself.

  I let a week pass and then wrote you another letter, pleading for five minutes of your company, some kind of closure, not mentioning the fiasco in the rain.

  I got no answer. For weeks my obsession with you deformed my life.

  I was late for appointments or forgot them altogether, got into a pointless argument with a supervisor at work, broke off with a woman I’d been dating on and off for almost a year. Nevertheless, when anyone asked, I confidently announced that my infatuation with you was a thing of the past.

  The first of our illicit encounters is on a Wednesday at the Plaza and we make love rather warily that second first time as if auditioning for roles we hope to be assigned.

  This is the start of a series of late afternoon Wednesday liaisons, most of them at the Plaza, all of them at your behest.

  One of the conditions for our weekly encounters is that I ask no questions about your life and offer as little information as possible about mine. Nevertheless, on occasion, in the most casual way, almost as if you were talking to yourself, you let slip off-handed news about your husband’s tastes, mention plays the two of you have seen together, refer to movies you deplored that Tom enjoyed.

  It seems to me for a while at least that I am the more secretive one. I never mention that I am also married, though living apart, separated but not quite divorced.

  I am not sure what to make of our two hour a week routine. It seems an interlude, pleasurable certainly, not something I would want to give up, that exists outside my real life. I see it as a consolation for what we didn’t have twenty-seven years ago when something real may have been at stake.

  Then one afternoon, an hour or so before our standing appointment, you call me at work to say you can’t make it today, no explanation offered, barely an apology. It is the first call I have gotten from you since the surprise of your invitation to lunch.

  Whatever my public story, I had difficulty accepting that your resolve not to see me was unalterable. For a long time, I continued to fantasize about you, imagined you calling to say you had broken with Roger, imagined us running toward each other on a crowded street, knocking people out of the way though never quite connecting. In one of my private scenarios, you would invite me over to your place (Roger mysteriously away), but then we would sit in silence, sometimes across from one another, sometimes side by side, tongue-tied with astonishment.

  When I couldn’t imagine you back into my bed, I started dating again—a married woman (unhappily married, she said without saying)—and I gradually stopped obsessing about what I might have done, and didn’t, to get you back.

  It isn’t that you’re the only woman in my life or that I’m smitten with you, or that our Wednesday afternoon fucking is indispensable to my wellbeing. At least, that’s my understanding of the situation until the moment after your first cancellation.
It is human nature no doubt that when something (or someone) becomes unavailable its value becomes immediately enhanced. So my disappointment at not seeing you this Wednesday is not to be made too much of. The odd thing is that I have been aware of resenting that you made all the arrangements (mostly all) for our assignations, assuming that I would go along with your plans. Recently, I’ve even imagined a scenario where I decided at the last minute not to show up.

  Instead, you are the first to cancel, and when it happens it takes me a fretful hour or two to figure out what else I might do with my unsubscribed evening. I choose a movie at the Angelica to fill this hole in my day—something much admired which I haven’t gotten around to yet—but I walk out before it’s over, impatient with what seems to me its basic dishonesty.

  In bed that night, out of favor with the gods of sleep, I rehearse in my head an inconclusive conversation we had the week before, you asking what our once a week lovemaking means to me, insisting you want an honest reply.

  “I like being with you,” I hear myself say.

  “Yes?”

  “And you?” I ask out of a sense of the obligation to reciprocate, not really wanting an answer.

  “It’s something I need to do for myself,” you say.

  “What is it that you need to do for yourself?” I ask. “Have illicit sex or have illicit sex with me?”

  The next week when we get together, I ask you how you spent your time without me.

  “My husband was sick,” you say. “He asked me to stay with him.”

  I let the news sink in, wondering if I feel jealous of the husband whose name I somehow think of as Roger.

  After the lost week, it is as if our bodies need to get acquainted with each other all over again. When you are dressing in your dreamy, painstaking way as prelude to going home, you say, “I can sense that you’re beginning to get tired of me. We need to find another hotel or someone’s empty apartment. A change of scenery. What do you think?”

  “Last week, when you told me you weren’t coming,” I say, “my life felt empty. I felt unbearably deprived.”