You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  You turn your face away in what I take to be a gesture of contempt.

  “Do you know,” you say, “that’s the first affectionate thing you’ve said to me.” Tears rain down your face in profusion as they had when you stood next to me at Joshua and Genevieve’s wedding.

  I say your name as if I were an amnesiac recovering a lost fragment of memory.

  Lying under the covers, I watch you as if you were a character in a movie, as you open the door in your purposeful way to leave me for wherever it is you go when you disappear. You turn to glance at me as an afterthought. “Will you choose the place for next week?” you ask.

  I imagine I answer you, but in fact I say nothing, watching the door close between us. “I stood two hours in the rain for you,” I say to the closed door, then I get out of bed and into my clothes, making sure ten minutes had elapsed (we are careful not to leave at the same time) before I exit the hotel and return by subway to my apartment.

  To some degree, I’ve had to take on faith that you were the same woman I met at Joshua and Genevieve’s wedding twenty-seven years ago. Of course there are certain similarities, but I read them as merely circumstantial. It’s the crying for no apparent reason—the only flaw in what I think of as your perfect cool—that alters my perspective. It is as though a spell had been cast that turned you into an unrecognizable older woman and now the spell has been broken. You are once again the princess-stranger I imagined I couldn’t live without almost half a lifetime ago.

  I am not without resources of self-protection. I know that to fall in love with you is a sure way to lose you and I make an effort to seem as self-possessed and untouched as performance allows.

  One evening you announce in bed that you are going to Prague for two weeks with Tom. “Will you miss me?” you ask as if the question amuses you.

  “Why do you have to go?” I say.

  “Don’t you think we could do with a break?” you say, getting out of bed. “Anyway, Tom asked me to go with him and it’s a chance to see a place I’ve never been to before. So.”

  I come up behind you as you are putting your sweater on over your head. “A hug for the road,” I say. “Something to last me for two weeks.”

  You move out of my grasp before I am ready to give you up.

  “It makes my jumpy when you’re affectionate,” you say. “I feel you take our Wednesday afternoon love nest pretty much for granted. I suspect while I’m away, you’ll wonder from time to time what whatshername is doing whereversheis. You’re a nice man, at least I think you are, but living in New York all these years has made you jaded.”

  “Has it?”

  “I like that about you,” you say. “I really do.” You blow me a kiss at the door and then hesitate as if waiting for me to say something.

  Afraid that I’ll never see you again, an odd, wholly impractical idea comes to mind. “What if …,” I start to say. What if I followed you to Prague and …

  I know that you return on Sunday and wonder, expecting nothing, if you’ll find some way to get in touch. Two days pass without word and then you leave a cryptic message on my home phone about calling you after ten the following morning.

  I finally reach you at noon moments before you have to leave on some unexplained errand. “We need to talk,” you say.

  You make arrangements to meet me for lunch the next day at the same Vietnamese restaurant we dined at when you suggested the affair.

  The portents are not difficult to read. We could have had the same talk at our hotel room at the Plaza before or after making love if something else wasn’t in the wind. Choosing the Vietnamese place provides a kind of symmetry. Only a fool wouldn’t recognize that this is your way of calling an end to whatever it is that’s been going on between us. My first impulse is to preempt your move by striking first, but it seems a childish gesture despite its obvious satisfactions.

  The real question, the one I have evaded all these months, is what do I want beyond maintaining the status quo. I confess to myself that I don’t know. Ambivalence is, and has been, my MO. And even if I do know, even if I am ready (and I am not) to press you to leave your husband, what’s his name, it will surely do me no good.

  The substance of our talk over lunch is not what I spend a mostly sleepless night anticipating. What you want, what you say you want, is not to stop seeing me but to change the day of our assignations. Wednesdays are no longer possible for you. Monday evening, 5 to 7ish, is suddenly your only available time. The news brings a mixture of relief and unaccountable disappointment.

  That’s fine, I’m ready to say, but then I remember that I have my tennis game Monday nights, which has entailed renting a court for the indoor season. Beyond the obligation to show up, it is a great pleasure for me to play. “Monday won’t work,” I say.

  “I was afraid of that,” you say. “There’s no way—I shouldn’t even ask you this—you can shift things around?”

  “Not really,” I say. “What about you?”

  You offer an exasperated sigh. “You have no idea, my friend,” you say, “how difficult it’s been for me to see you as I have. What is it that you do on Monday nights that’s so important?”

  The imperiousness in your tone annoys me and, though I want to make peace, want our routine to continue, I feel it a matter of pride to hold my ground. “It’s an obligation,” I say.

  “Yes?” you say. “To whom?”

  “I have this tennis game Monday nights,” I say. “There are three other people who rely on me to be there.”

  “A tennis game? A tennis game! I don’t know what to say.”

  As you rise stiffly from your chair, I put my hand on your arm to restrain you. “Please don’t leave,” I say. “We’ll find another time that suits us both.”

  “I don’t know that I want to see you again,” you say, returning my hand to me. It is as if we are moving in different universes or perhaps a willed indifference keeps me from running after you. Whatever it is, you are out of the restaurant and into a cab before I can settle the bill (someone has to pay it) and pursue you to no avail.

  We hardly ever fought even about inconsequential things before and suddenly we are locked in our first life-and-death fight. I’m willing to sacrifice tennis for you, but it seems virtually impossible now to yield to your demands since I have already drawn my line in the sand. Haven’t you been unreasonable too? You haven’t bothered to tell me what unbreakable commitments on your side prevent us meeting some other time.

  I let a day pass to get some perspective on my feelings and then I call you at home at a time your husband is usually at work. I get your answering machine and mumble something unintelligible before hanging up in despair.

  The next time I call—I let two days pass before I try again—you pick up, but you don’t stay on the line long enough to hear me out, though I’m aware, even while pleading for your forgiveness, that the things I’m willing to say are not what you want to hear. When I think about our standoff, which is all I do, it strikes me that I have more reason to be angry at you than you at me, but such wisdom seems idle comfort.

  A further irony: I pull something in my back playing tennis and I have to take a month off from the game.

  And then one day, six months or so after our misunderstanding, you call me at home on a Saturday afternoon.

  You identify yourself, though of course I know immediately that it’s you. “How are you?” you ask.

  “Much better now that I hear your voice,” I say.

  Your laugh sounds as if it has been rehearsed. “I’m really calling to say goodbye,” you say. “My husband’s firm is moving him back to the London office and we leave at the end of the month. As a matter of fact, we leave in four days.”

  “Four days,” I repeat, trying to remember if you ever told me what it is he does. “For how long?”

  “You never know,” you say. “It could be forever for all anyone knows.”

  “That’s a long time,” I say. “Well, I hope it’s what y
ou want.”

  “Thank you for that,” you say. “Look, I’m free, or can be, on Tuesday at about 5 and I wonder if we could meet at the Plaza.”

  The unholy surprise of your offer astonishes me into a protracted silence.

  “If you can’t make it,” you say, “I’ll pretend to be understanding.”

  “I can make it,” I say.

  My acceptance creates a momentary silence on your end. “Well, good,” you say. “I’ve reserved our old room.”

  It is not our old room after all, but the one directly above, which has certain similarities and as such seems disconcertingly dreamlike.

  You are uncharacteristically late and it strikes me—I tend to expect the worst—that you might still be angry and decide not to show up. These anxious feelings persist even after your arrival.

  “Damn,” you say, putting on your glasses for confirmation, “everything’s changed.” We remain in our clothes for awhile, one of us sitting on the bed, the other in an overstuffed chair across the room.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” you say, “but I’m feeling shy. It’s not only that we haven’t seen each other in a while; it’s something else altogether. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

  “You know we don’t have to make love,” I say. “We can just sit and talk.”

  “What should we talk about,” you say. And I have the sense that if I say anything at this point, you’ll put on your coat and go home.

  I shrug and offer what I hope is a comforting smile.

  “What should we talk about?” you say again. “You know sometimes I don’t understand you at all. Is that what you want to come to the Plaza with me for the last time not to make love?”

  You seem about to cry and I will myself to move toward you and end up kneeling awkwardly beside your chair, the forgotten ache in my back making an unexpected return.

  “How much I hated you these past months,” you say. “You can’t possibly imagine. I even thought of running you over in a rented car when you were coming out of your damn tennis club.”

  I put my head in your lap and you say, “Is this what you think I want,” abruptly tugging at my hair, and for that moment, I regret forgiving you, I regret giving in to your whims, I regret being here with you when we have no future. As I’m about to say, “I don’t need this from you,” you lean toward me and kiss my eyes. “I hate you,” you whisper. “I will hate you for as long as we both shall live.”

  “Those sound like wedding vows,” I say.

  “Are you making fun of me? Is that what it’s come to?”

  I lift you to your feet and we dance—you in your heels, me in my stocking feet—to whatever music the silence provides.

  When we finally get under the covers, I notice from the clock on the wall that we have less than an hour left us. I imagine the hour passing, imagine our fucking, which is more tender than usual, though not quite as intense as it has been at its best. I imagine you getting into your clothes, that refined and complicated ritual, while I consider pleading with you to stay five minutes longer. I imagine watching you from the hotel window as you get into a waiting cab and drive off to your husband, whom I envision as a shadow figure. Then I imagine the two of you, you and the shadow husband, boarding a flight for London. Then I imagine getting older and being alone and trying to remember this last time together, which has passed with so little moment.

  It is only then when I have already imagined the end of whatever has gone on between us, that we begin to make love—we have been holding each other carefully, cautiously—and it seems like the first time, which I don’t actually remember, which I confuse with a number of other first times, but I allow myself to imagine that we are in my old Village apartment in my unmade bed and that it hurts me that you live with a man named Roger (though I know you don’t love him) and whatever is happening between us (sex no doubt, terrifying intimacy, the compelling illusion of love) will go on for as long as I can imagine it going on, for as long as consciousness and self-deception and the trick of memory survives.

  THREE

  ___

  I tend to feel claustrophobic in elevators even when I’m the only passenger, especially so when I’m imprisoned by myself. My imagination tends to betray me. I anticipate getting stuck somewhere between floors, trapped in an airless space for an extended, open-ended piece of time. So meeting you or anyone in an elevator is an unlikely circumstance for someone who rides only when there is no other choice. The rickety elevator in this old Upper West Side building—my friends the Powers live on the fourteenth floor (there is no thirteenth, its own example of omen-phobia)—does not inspire confidence.

  So I am prepared to trudge down twelve flights when I notice you waiting, sparks of impatience floating around your head like an aura, for the ancient elevator to hurtle noisily upward in its death-defying slow-motion to take you down, and I make a rapid reassessment of my options. You ignore my presence and continue to stare determinedly at the elevator doors.

  “Waiting long?” I ask.

  “Forever,” you say, barely glancing at me as if the elevator’s arrival depended on your impatient vigil.

  When it arrives, I casually follow you in just as the doors begin to close.

  Not wanting to intrude, I stand at least three feet away, waiting with disguised anxiety in my own separate but unequal universe for the elevator to release us again into the world.

  During our endless (or so it seems) plummet to earth, I rehearse silently in almost infinite variation an invitation to you to go off with me for a drink.

  The performance, though rehearsed to a fault, never gets to play before its intended audience.

  We each in turn refuse to violate the silence.

  When we separate you say, “Nice to have met you,” though in fact we have never met, have never been introduced, have only exchanged glances across a crowded room.

  I call out my name to your back as you dash off, and as you wave to a taxi that actually stops at your signal.

  The next time we get together it is in another elevator in a building no more than seven blocks from the first for another party, this time ascending. You seem less preoccupied, less unhappy, and you introduce yourself as if we had never seen each other before.

  “Weren’t you at the Powers a few weeks ago?” I say.

  “Oh were you there too?” you say, studying my face. “Yes, I believe I remember seeing you. You have the face of a pirate.”

  “A pirate? What do you mean, a pirate?”

  “That was the thing that struck me about you,” you say. “It’s a good look really. I wouldn’t let it worry you.”

  This is a much quicker elevator than the one in the Powers’ building and we are at our floor before I can come up with an appropriate response.

  At the party itself, you wink at me the few times I catch your eye, but we never actually get to talk.

  I leave early, having somewhere else to go, carrying with me (what else is there to do with it?) your incomprehensible pirate remark. No one has ever told me that I look like a pirate before. That night, I study my face in the bathroom mirror, looking for clues to what you think you see.

  This is what I discover. I discover that I like the idea that you imagine I look like a pirate because even after my extended acquaintance with my reflection, I see none of it. Well, maybe something of it—the bags under the eyes, the sour turn of the mouth, the all-day 4 o’clock shadow. Is that the way a pirate looks? I don’t know if I’ve ever knowingly seen a pirate outside of the movies.

  I become counter-phobic about elevators, riding them at every opportunity, an imaginary pirate-like bravado driving me, hoping to run into you again in our favored place of encounter.

  If it happens, or rather when it happens, I will say that you look like a princess that any self-respecting pirate would like to ride off with in his pirate ship. Of course that can’t be said without embarrassing us both. Something will come to mind I tell myself.

&nb
sp; I am riding up in an elevator to see my father, who lives on the fifth floor of a twelve-floor building, and when the elevator opens to let me out (it hesitates just enough to give a seasoned pirate pause), you are there waiting to enter.

  “Hello,” I say, and again you don’t seem to recognize me.

  “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” you say. “I know we have. It wasn’t at college, was it?”

  I hold the door for you as you enter and in turn, you hold it for me as I take your place on the other side, the door sliding shut between us.

  “You said I looked like a pirate,” I shout impulsively at the closed door just as the elevator begins its descent. I imagine I hear the echo of your laugh, or someone’s laugh, and I consider for an abortive moment running down the steps to meet you as you land.

  Once I’ve pursued you in conjectured scenario, the pursuit itself, the flight down the stairs, seems anticlimactic. So I don’t get off the mark, regretting in advance the missed opportunity.

  As a rule, after my visit with my father, needing to reclaim my separateness, I walk down the four flights to the street. On this occasion, however, I ride the elevator, braving the danger, in the unadmitted hope of another chance encounter.

  In my experience, anticipation inevitably denies possibility. When the elevator arrives to pick me up, there is no other passenger, not you, not anyone like you, inside waiting to get out.

  So I have my head down, am without expectation, when the elevator deposits me on the first floor. A man with a large black dog takes my place in the elevator and I make my way to the outside door, nodding to the security guy as I pass his post, trying to visualize where exactly I parked my car.

  “Hello there,” someone says to me, the almost familiar voice intruding on my private despair.

  When I look up, you are standing to my right, carrying a bag of groceries, waiting for me to acknowledge you.

  It takes me a moment to pull myself free from the quicksand of distraction. I nod gravely, acknowledging your fortuitous presence as if it were some kind of divine omen. And this time it is you who announce that we’ve met before, the details (a few of them) unexpected news.