You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “Nothing would make me happier,” you say, “than to see you genuinely happy, but that’s always been out of my hands. You’ve heard what I have to say so what do you have to say?” I suggest a walk, which invites a skeptical look, and signal to the wrong waitress for our bill, which comes in any event from another direction.

  I wake, slumped back in a chair in your living room, unaware of how I got there, when I’m suddenly aware of you crossing the room in slow motion, your backless slippers slapping the floor. “I’m still bleeding,” I hear you say. “Shouldn’t the bleeding have stopped by now?” “What did the doctor say?” I hear myself answer. “Would I have asked you if I knew?” you say, disappearing from the room.

  There is a police action outside the restaurant, five uniformed cops surrounding a homeless Asian man of about sixty, who is waving his arms and talking to himself. One of the cops has his gun drawn. A small crowd looks on as if they were deer caught in some universal headlight. I try to move you in an opposite direction, but you refuse to relinquish your vigil. “Shouldn’t we do something?” you say.

  Roger sulks as the dessert course circulates and you pretend not to notice. “Do you give doggy bags,” F asks, “for those who can’t finish this wonderful meal?” Hans, on the other hand, finishes his lemon mousse bomb in short order and reaches across the table to annex F’s. “It’s scrumptious,” F says, yielding her dish—the dessert itself untouched—with apparent relief. Elizabeth offers me hers, but in fact I’ve only been able to get down a third of mine. Roger, after only a few bites, rushes off to the bathroom, his hand on his stomach. You survey the table, shaking your head in my direction, with an amused smile on your face. “I have to say,” you say, “that Hans is the only one that gets an ‘A’.”

  You approach the policeman next to the one who has his gun drawn and ask what danger the man they’ve surrounded represents. I can’t hear the rest of the conversation, but there are several exchanges back and forth before you return to my side. “What happened?” I ask. At first you don’t answer, but instead take my arm and urge me away down the street in the direction I originally offered. I have to ask again to get my answer and still you hesitate as if we were dealing here with classified information. “He threatened to arrest me for obstructing justice,” you say, looking over your shoulder. I am tempted to laugh but I can see that you are in no mood to be amused by absurdity.

  You ask me to help you lift something when the others go into the living room with their espresso cups, but that is only a ruse so that you can ask me something else. “If you think I’m making a big mistake, I wish you’d tell me,” you say. “I think you’re making a big mistake,” I say. “You don’t really,” you say, “do you? Or is that the voice of jealousy talking?” That’s when Roger enters the kitchen and sees us with our heads together and I can tell from his scowl that he has put the worst possible interpretation on our being together. “How are you feeling, darling?” you say to him. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  There seem to be police cars everywhere, the next street blocked off, and we walk determinedly in silence as if no dialogue is possible between us until we’re outside the law’s ubiquitous presence. “It’s an illusion, isn’t it?” you say. “It’s the plot of a bad movie when a man and a woman who have been friends the way we have suddenly decide they love each other. Of course they love each other. That’s what friendship’s about, isn’t it? Friends love one another.” We are standing on a corner having this talk when a police car drives by and the cop not driving waves to us to move on.

  “You used a milk product in the dessert without telling me” Roger says in a voice that alternates between fret and accusation. “You know I’m lactose intolerant.” “I guess I knew that but it slipped my mind,” you say. “Forgive me?” “How can I not?” he says. I am standing behind them in an awkward spot and I have to work my way between them to get by. “You’re such a sweet man,” she says. They have their arms around each other as I clatter out of the room, temporarily invisible by general consent.

  “You don’t have to stay,” you say returning to the bedroom after an extended imprisonment in the bathroom with the door conspicuously latched from inside. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’ve done because I do. Appreciate it. Thank you.” I put on my jacket as if it were a slow motion replay, telling myself that if I walk out as advised, you will hold it against me in the balance. “I’m going,” I say to the closed door of the bedroom and wait in vain the length of three heartbeats for a response before returning to the uncomfortable overstuffed chair to consider my next move.

  We all seem to have eaten too much, sit in your living room in various stages of open-mouthed stupor, cups and saucers jangling on our knees, all except Elizabeth who is not in the picture. Every five minutes or so Hans announces that it is time to go, but he seems embedded in the couch. F has her eyes shut, waking herself periodically with noisy belches, distantly troubled by the rage of her digestive system. I have just talked myself into standing up when Elizabeth, appearing as it seems from nowhere, comes toward me. “I need a favor from you,” she says. “Would you mind dropping me off at a hotel? I know you have a car with you or at least that’s what I’ve been told.” Roger interrupts, stepping into our as yet one-sided conversation before I can respond. “Don’t be silly, Liz,” he says. “You have a room here for as long as you need it.” “You’ve both been much too kind,” she says. “Really. I’d appreciate it if you backed off just a bit.” “I’ll give you a lift to wherever you want to go,” I say. “Don’t interfere in what doesn’t concern you,” Roger says. I don’t recall throwing a punch at that moment but more than one person that witnesses the event corroborates that perception so I will only say in my defense that it was an unexamined impulse run amok.

  The same police car that waved us on trails us, dogging our tracks, for a couple of blocks, though it’s possible, I admit grudgingly, that its persistent presence is circumstantial. Another couple, slightly younger, hurries past us. “They’re arresting people,” the woman says. “Get off the street if you can.” We run in their wake for a half a block, holding hands as we go. “This is the worst possible tactic,” you say to me. “Slow down. Pretend you’re talking to me. The last thing you want to show these people is that you’re afraid of them.”

  “I don’t have money to burn,” Elizabeth says to me as I start the car and head downtown. “Do you know of a cheapish place that’s not bug-ridden or anything?” I ask her how much she wants to spend, a question I never quite get an answer to. “No more than I have to,” she says or words to that effect. The first two hotels I stop at are “too pricey,” the third is “a bit skanky.” The fourth has another not so easily definable problem. After the inspection of each unacceptable hotel, she apologizes for taking up so much of my time, the apologies accumulating. My tiredness, I assume, includes hers as well and in fact she yawns a few times between the fifth and sixth hotel possibility. It is only then, I want you to know, that I invite her to spend the night in the unused second bedroom in my apartment. “Oh,” she says as if someone had put his hand on her ass in a public place. I realize after a moment or so of silence and the brief unexpected touch of her lips on my cheek that she has accepted my offer.

  The phone is ringing inside as I struggle to unlock the door to my apartment. That it is inappropriately late for a call makes the receiving of it all the more urgent. “I’m frightened,” the unrecognizable female voice on the other end whispers huskily after a moment of understated breathing. A wrong number, no doubt, and I am about to say so when the caller addresses me by name. “I know you understand what I’m going through,” you say. “Would you mind returning? I need someone around I can trust.”

  At the corner, a police van appears and cuts off the couple that had run past us. We watch as they are handcuffed and loaded into the back of the van, which seems from my vantage to have a crowd of other arrestees already inside. We step inside an antique clothing stor
e and you ask the proprietor if she knows what’s going on outside. “I try to mind my own business,” she says. “Do you mind if we hang out in here for a while?” I ask. The proprietor, who is a youngish woman with white hair, considers my question. “If you want to stay,” she says, not looking at us, speaking very slowly, “you’ll have to purchase something.” While you go through the shelves and racks and barrels—I have offered to buy as a gift whatever you pick out—I check out the street activity. It is hard to see anything without making whoever cares to look from the streetside aware of me. I’m not positive of this but someone—a man in uniform perhaps—seems to be coming in our direction.

  I have this idea as I unlatch the door to my undersized apartment that my guest room will seem as inadequate to Elizabeth as the various hotels she’s rejected. I offer her a drink of something, which she politely refuses, as a delaying technique. “It’s charming,” she says, traversing the hallway to my small living room, taking possession of my favorite chair. “I may not be putting this right, but it seems to me wonderfully impersonal.”

  When I return to your apartment you are waiting at the door for my arrival or so I think because the door opens virtually the moment I punch the buzzer. We sit together on your couch for a while, your head on my shoulder. “My friend, I feel so much better now that you’re here,” you say. Momentarily, you fall asleep and we sit this way awhile, you sleeping awkwardly on my shoulder, your head increasing in weight by the minute. Finally, careful not to wake you, I lift you up and carry you like a child into the bedroom. It is only after I put you under the covers in the dark, wondering if it would be all right to lie beside you, that I notice a shadowy form in the arm chair on the right side of the room.

  Elizabeth does not leave the next day or even the day after, is still in fact spending her nights in my guest room two weeks after her arrival the night of your dinner party. She has been looking for an apartment, she says, and has not been able to find something up to her standards at a price she thinks she can afford. You and Roger have gotten it into your heads, seem to take it for granted, that we’re having some kind of torrid affair, which I’ve given up denying. I’m not sure myself what’s going on between us, but it’s not much. Roger calls here two or three times a week to speak to his sister and it is through his perception that I get your reaction to Elizabeth staying with me. You are furious with me, Roger says, and it is creating stresses in their relationship. “Elizabeth’s no trouble,” I say to him. “I should think not,” he says, meaning of course whatever it is he means.

  The cop looks in the window, but doesn’t come in the store and why should he? We hang out in the shop another fifteen minutes, each buying something of negligible use—I get a pair of hand-knitted gloves, gray with an orange leather patch at the palm—before returning to the street. By this time, we’ve learned that there’s been an unauthorized anti-war protest march in the vicinity, which explains the police activity and the random arrests. My idea is to move off in a direction that will separate us from the protesters, while you think we ought to show solidarity, even get ourselves arrested if that’s the way it plays out, since we’re in the neighborhood of the march anyway. And so we stand in front of the store, debating the relative merits of our positions in hushed voices. We end up, veering off in opposite directions, but after a couple of blocks, I decide—not wanting to seem a coward in your eyes—to turn around and go after you.

  And then of course, for no reason I can understand, the thing I have been denying (or at least feeling privately innocent about), becomes, if I am to continue to see myself as an honorable person, undeniable. I say “for no reason I can understand” because I have not been attracted to Elizabeth, at least not insofar as I understand my feelings. And still it happens, the thing we’d been denying, and happens again. Elizabeth had knocked on my study door while I was working, something I’d asked her not to do, and then entered soundlessly before I had a chance to say “I’m busy” or “Come in,” whichever came first to mind. “I want to say something to you,” she said in a barely audible voice, which seemed to merge with the text I was working on. “Yes?” without turning around. “I’ll come back when you’re less busy. You’ve been so kind to me the last thing I want to be is a nuisance. You’ve probably been saying to yourself when is this person going to leave.” By this point her aggressive self-effacement is beginning to wear on me. “Well …” I say. “It’s true, isn’t it?” she says. “You’ve hated having me here and you’ve been too discreet or whatever to let me know. At the very least, you ought to let me make it up to you. It will make me feel better.” I thought she was going to suggest, as she had several times before, treating me to dinner or something of the kind and so I say, making light of her earnestness, “Anything that makes you feel better will make me feel better.” And what could I have possibly meant by that. Inevitably, she misconstrues my remark—we misread each other and ourselves—isn’t that the nature of misunderstanding—every step of the way. And that’s the way the neurasthenic Elizabeth and I end up in bed together, each doing the other a presumed kindness neither wants nor appreciates.

  I hurry after you while trying if possible to avoid police attention and think I see you a block or so away at the back edge of a group, marching under the banner DANCERS AGAINST WAR. It’s not at all clear to me why some people are being arrested and others ignored. Even as I hurry toward you a van passes and I can see that the back is dense with protesters pressed against one another like a rush-hour subway car. And then, to my surprise, I see you running toward me and I increase my pace and we meet midstreet and embrace as if months had passed and not minutes since our last meeting. “We can leave,” she says, “if you want. It was important to me that you came to get me.” We walk off with our arms around each other, each carrying the plastic bag with our antique clothing store purchase in our other hand.

  “It’s nothing,” you say in answer to the question I haven’t yet asked. I stare at the shadow, perched in your armchair, trying in the dark to decipher who or what it is. Its continued silence seems to me ominous. “Would you turn on the light?” I ask, wondering at the same time whether that’s the choice I really want to make. You hesitate. “It’s very bright,” you say. “You’ll have to shut your eyes before I turn it on.” I am reluctant to shut my eyes, so I offer to look away instead, which makes you laugh. “Just shut your eyes,” you say. “It’s no big deal. As soon as the light is on you can open them again.”

  Once the affair starts it has its own disconcerting momentum. It isn’t that we’re in love or even particularly affectionate with one another. It’s just that the sex—the fucking—takes on an urgency neither of us seems able to resist, which makes getting anything else done virtually impossible. Since I work at home and Elizabeth has no job, the opportunity for sex is virtually endless. After the first encounter, Elizabeth moves into my room with my unacknowledged, perhaps grudging consent. The odd thing is, in that period between encounters—those increasingly rare moments when we aren’t going at it—I long to have my apartment to myself again. But those feelings pass when she comes into my study and holds out her hand and says, somewhat shyly, “Do you mind…?” And then of course when I acknowledge to Roger that something is going on between us, he seems skeptical of my confession, says “Well, you said there wasn’t anything going on and I took you at your word and where did that get me? Why should I believe you now?”

  A cab drifts by and I hail it and we both get in. When the driver says where to, we both almost simultaneously, announce the address of the other’s place. And then we look at each other and giggle foolishly. In any event, the driver takes off without further instructions and I wonder—I suppose we both do—which of the two addresses he has been given he has decided on. You whisper something to me that I can’t quite decipher and we kiss, and we kiss, the kind of public behavior I find hateful in others. I let the moment take me where it will until self-consciousness sets in, and I become frightened, anxious perhaps
, not at where things might go but where perhaps they might not.

  Elizabeth is out, looking for a place to live—she is actually considering putting a deposit on an apartment she saw yesterday—when you call. The talk recedes from small to smaller to smallest and then, without preliminary, you ask if I could meet you for a late lunch today. “How late?” I ask, though it is not a matter of when for me but whether. “Twoish,” you say. When I hesitate you say, “It may be difficult for me to get away from work. Maybe we ought to make this date for tomorrow or for some time next week.” “Is there something particular you want to discuss?” I ask. “Not really,” you say. “I do want you to know how happy it makes me to hear that you’ve been happy. You have been happy, haven’t you? That’s the word on the street.”

  The cab lets us off in front of your building and I trail you to the door. You don’t ask whether I’d like to come in but the offer seems implicit so I follow you to the elevator and, after a mostly silent trip where we stand apart not quite looking at one another as if recreating our earliest beginnings, into your apartment which seems on its best behavior as if company were expected. “What can I get you?” you ask. “What are you offering?” I say. And that’s when you come over and wrap your arms around me, punctuated by a sigh of exhaustion, and I wonder, not willing to ask, if that’s your best offer.

  I am assessing my feelings about Elizabeth’s relocation—how much do I really mind? I miss her but I’m also glad to have my place to myself—when the doorbell rings unexpectedly. My imagination of possibilities doesn’t extend any further than Elizabeth’s return, for which I already have a predetermined response. So when you of all people appear looking like something out of one of my erotic fantasies in a long-skirted, apple-green summer dress, I am not so much disappointed as unmoored. “I called first,” you say. “I tried to reach you but your line was either busy or something wrong with your phone.” What else can I do but invite you in. “I can’t stay,” you announce as you step beyond the threshold, which I immediately translate into, Don’t expect me to jump into your bed. “Where’s Lizzy?” you ask. My answer is to glance behind me and offer empty hands. “I can see that she’s not behind you,” you say, which creates a momentary breach in the good feeling between us. “She’s taken her own apartment,” I say, which you no doubt know or you wouldn’t have shown up as you have. “What a coincidence,” you say. “Roger is moving out of my place as we speak.”