You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  It is as though someone or something rushes by me as the light goes on. When I adjust my eyes to the glare—for an extended moment I see only dots—we are alone in the room, an unaccountable salty smell in the air. You invite me to sit on the edge of the bed, mentioning only once and in an offhand way that intercourse after a D&C is out of the question for at least three weeks. “What can I do to make things up to you?” you ask, offering from under the covers a pale hand like a found object. “I’ll take a rain check,” I say, lying down next to you. “Forget it,” you say. “This offer is only good until daylight.”

  It’s the interludes—the moments of frustrating delay—that tend to ruin things. I am sitting on the edge of your bed in my boxers, catching flashes of my protruding gut in the wall mirror, waiting for you to emerge from the bathroom. I make a point of not looking at my watch, but I sense at least ten minutes have passed since you announced your imminent return. My hard-on nods and stretches in your attenuated absence, establishes a mourner’s posture. Your large, feral cat, Isabella, pokes her way in and sniffs the air, checking me out from a protective distance. I hold out a hand in her direction, whisper her name. As an afterthought, having ignored me throughout, she jumps on the bed. That’s the moment you choose to re-enter the room, wearing a lime-green silk bathrobe that I may have given to you on some forgotten occasion, much of your left breast making an uncredited cameo. “What’s going on?” you say as Isabella bumps up against my shoulder. “I can’t leave the room for a moment, can I?”

  My interest in you, which embarrasses me all things considered, has in recent years been swathed in denial. “I’ll lie alongside you,” I say as if I were the one doing you the favor, which may also be true. My offer, though implicitly accepted, is not received with notable enthusiasm. You are tired of course, and wounded, have lost to perceived necessity, to sacrificial slaughter, your unborn living other self. There is no comfort I can offer to answer that loss particularly when only a few hours ago you welcomed it. And while lying next to you in your rueful, wounded state—what could be more obscene?—my penis stands warily on guard. Your hand notices. “My poor baby,” you say.

  “I’ll have a glass and then I’ll go,” you say, your back against the closed door, still in your coat. “It’ll be awkward, don’t you think, if Elizabeth walks in on us.” I edge toward you in a kind of willed slow motion, daring you to move out of my way. We crash softly against the door. “She no longer has a key,” I whisper before almost kissing your ear as you avert your head.

  I am wary of seeming too eager so I instruct myself in the art of indifference, wait with checkered patience for you to make the first move. It’s not happening. We lie on our sides, facing each other from a modest distance. Finally, you seem to slip almost imperceptibly in my direction as if my greater weight had tilted the bed and, encouraged, I enjoin the space between us. A chaste kiss followed by a second peck, followed by its open-mouthed, tongue-stabbing sister and then I undo your robe in a kind of antiintuitive dream act, parting the front before opening the belt. A nervous laugh escapes from your side of the bed, a childish giggle, a mousy squeak. A cry.

  “I don’t know if I want to do this at this time,” you say, pulling me toward you with one arm, while holding me away with the other hand. “If you don’t know, who does?” I say.

  “Does that make you happy?” you ask from some beneficent distance.

  It follows, doesn’t it, it tends to follow, that when you get what you want, what you think you’ve always wanted—I’m speaking of myself here in the generic “you”—it isn’t anything like you thought it would be. Why isn’t it?

  “I’d be happier if you didn’t ask that question,” I mumble in the denouement itself or just before I explode in your hand.

  “Can you promise me that Elizabeth won’t return?” you say. “I’m willing to promise anything if it will get me what I want,” I say.

  Then again there is the counter-productive pressure to perform brilliantly when I am with you so I am tempted to accept the ambiguous opportunity you offer me to gracefully withdraw. To back out while making it seem as if you are the one making the decision. Then it hits me, which changes everything, that you are the one making the decision.

  “I want to be out front with you,” you say. “I loved being with you, but I don’t think we ought to do this again.”

  “As long as I have your word for it,” you say. Every creak in the floorboards turns your head as if the only scenario that occupies you in the act of love is Elizabeth’s return to claim her place.

  “Doesn’t it matter that I love you?”

  Even as I take whatever risk you allow me, I feel myself backing off. “Do you love me?” you murmur or perhaps it is something else.

  As we tangle, as I slide into you, This is what I want playing in my skull like a rediscovered tune, there is a knock at the door that repeats itself.

  “Yes,” I say under my breath, “yes.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  PART

  II

  ___

  SEVEN

  ___

  It’s a presumption, she thought, for someone you’re no longer with and no longer love to write a book addressed to you. It’s equally presumptuous perhaps to assume that an unnamed character with whom you share, if only metaphorically, certain behaviors is intended as you.

  Still, who else can You be if not her? More than 50 percent of the character’s attributes are hers or close enough. JB gets off on getting intimates seriously pissed off at him and she’s hardly the rule-affirming exception. That’s all she will say at the moment without her analyst in the room or at least an impartial third party, which excludes most of the people who’ve passed through the revolving doors of their story.

  First things first: her name is V. Lois Lane. The V stands for Virginia and is only used on her driver’s license. She is a former Lifestyle Editor of The Daily Metropolis and is currently Articles Editor for the hippest monthly on the newstands, The Magazine.

  There will be none of the evasions of anonymity in her text, though she is a shy person, who tries to disguise her shyness by saying whatever comes into her head no matter how outrageous or indiscreet. She doesn’t censor her conversation, that’s not her style, because if she did, she sorely doubts she’d ever get anything said.

  What the text provisionally called YOU never mentions is that Jay and I actually lived together for an extended disputed, depending on your source, period of time. The meeting in an elevator repeatedly, circumstantially, as a means of bringing us together is pure fantasy—or literary conceit if you will. Jay and I met through an ad in, of all places, The New York Review of Books. After I broke up with Roger, my childhood sweetheart and first husband—yes, his name was actually Roger—my sister, presumably concerned about my state of mind, took out a Personals ad on my behalf in The New York Review. The idea was to interview the various respondents until she found someone she deemed suitable for me and then bring us together in a way that would seem uncontrived. Delores was in a relationship herself at the time so there was bound to be some awkwardness inherent in the procedure.

  Jay, who claims never to have answered a Personals ad before, was the fourth or fifth respondent and the first to pass Lorrie’s test. Why it required six separate dates for Lorrie to settle on him as “perfect” for me remains one of those mysteries better left unexplored.

  In any event, for their seventh date, Lorrie invited Jay to dinner to meet me, not mentioning to either of us at the outset the disguised intention of the invitation. In fact, we were both somewhat annoyed at the other’s unexpected presence until Lorrie, during the dessert course, offered us a slightly fictionalized version of what she had been about. “This is my sister,” she said as if that were title enough for anyone. “This is Jay sometimes called JB.”

  I have a confession to make before I go any further. I was the one, the well-meaning officious one who took the ad out for my sister, who had been going
through a man-hating phase. Therefore the reason for the six dates was not quite the mystery I made it out to be earlier, though I was never really sure of my motives. Why hadn’t I turned Jay over to Lorrie earlier? I can only give you my reasons at the time, which were these. There was something about him that I found elusive, even remote. Who was JB really beyond the pose of his self-presentation? With each date, I said to myself the next date will decide my course of action one way or another. And maybe—I’m not quite ready to admit this—I didn’t want to relinquish him.

  Still, when I gave the dinner in which the two of them met for the first time, I was clear about what I was doing, or clear enough. I stood up during the dessert course, which was an apple crisp (from a new, untried recipe) I had made for the occasion, and announced myself. “I have an explanation to make to you, Jay,” I said. “The person I described in the ad you answered was not really me; it was my sister Lorrie. I’m sorry about the deception, but I knew Lorrie would never take an ad out on her own. So. Also, the bio I gave you about myself was Lorrie’s bio and not my information—Lorrie is the actress who day-jobs as a dental hygienist.”

  At this point Lorrie interrupted. “This is unbelievable,” she said in a mild voice. “What right did you have to do that?” Jay, I noticed, seemed unruffled, continued to negotiate his crisp, though at a more meditative pace. His indifference, if that’s what it was, was more troubling to me than the anger I anticipated.

  “I had hoped you would understand,” I said to him. “The person you were interested in you only thought was me when essentially it was my sister, Lorrie. I have a good feeling about you two, I do. Anyway, I’m already in a long-standing relationship and I’d be bending the truth if I said I didn’t love my partner.”

  By that time we were both staring at Jay waiting for him to show his colors.

  He had to swallow and then wipe the corner of his mouth with his napkin before he could speak. We waited and waited to no avail.

  “I have had it up to here with both of you,” Lorrie said. “I’m going home now if there’s no objection. If I stay, I’m likely to say something you’ll both find unforgivable.”

  “I’ll see you home,” he said, getting up from the table, making a point of not looking in my direction.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “I’m not going anywhere with him,” Lorrie said. “I got here by myself and I can see myself home or any place else for that matter.”

  After Lorrie left, promising to call when she felt better about things, Jay and I got naked together for the first time. It started with a friendly kiss. Afterward, he said, “Was that you as yourself in bed with me or you as your sister?”

  I wondered myself, but I saw no point in acknowledging the question as worthy of response.

  “Will I see you again?” I said to him as he was getting ready to leave. It was the kind of question that just asks for grief, but I uttered it despite myself, oblivious to better judgment, and so was stuck with the consequences.

  “Whenever you want,” he said, which might have been the most generous thing he ever said to me.

  Nevertheless (it seemed only fair, didn’t it?), I was prepared to hand him over to Delores if that’s what they both wanted.

  By the time Lorrie called, two days had intervened and I was in another place in regard to Jay, an emotional backwater hitherto uncharted. It was the tone of Lorrie’s call that made me aware that I was now unwilling to accept the terms of the arrangement I had authored. When she announced with muted enthusiasm that all things considered she might be willing to get together with Jay for a drink some time, I said, “No, no, forget it, please. I made a mistake and I apologize for it.”

  Three months after JB and Lorrie started dating, Roger and I agreed to a trial separation., which from my perspective was merely a halfway house for ending our seven-year marriage. It was a few days after we double-dated with Jay and Lorrie that I found myself displeased with almost everything Roger did. I thought it can’t be all my fault, can it, though it probably was and it had something to do with Jay. Whatever that something was I had been aware of it for a while without acknowledging it to myself. That was about the time that Lorrie was on the blower with me virtually every day, thanking me to obnoxious excess for bringing the two of them together.

  On the other hand, Jay never called to thank me for delivering Lorrie to him. Was there a message there? Maybe he still hated me for having lured him into a relationship with someone else.

  I was riding in the elevator up to work and I noticed the notorious novelist whose latest self-importance I had just completed and admired (while disliking) and I felt I owed him something, a smallish smile at least, for having bad-mouthed his book to an office associate. Anyway, we exchanged smiles as we were getting off at the same floor and I said to myself let’s see where this will lead. I was up for a flirtation with this notorious chauvinist, something to make me like myself more, whatever it took to improve the weather of my self-esteem.

  Lorrie announced over lunch at Zero’s that she couldn’t decide whether to move in with JB or not and then if she did (decide), whose place should it be, his bigger, hers better located and better put together. I entered the discussion with willed good faith as if we were not talking about a man I wanted (perhaps) for myself. “You know,” she said, “when we were younger, I would hardly have trusted you concerning Jay.” Funny that she thought that. My recollection was that she was the one—in high school in particular—who made a practice of going after boys who had shown interest in me first.

  He asked me to stop by his place after work for a drink and I took down the information on the back of the Publisher’s Weekly I was carrying, knowing (and not allowing myself to know) what it would likely come to. He had a carelessly nurtured reputation to uphold. The rest of the day I regretted having accepted his invitation, though I confess I was curious to see how he lived. The chance to eavesdrop on the secret life of his apartment was irresistible.

  “Was this his idea or yours?” I asked Lorrie, who mused over my question before changing the subject. Her evasiveness indicated to me that the suggestion to live together had not come from Jay. Later she said, “He’s been hinting in that direction but hasn’t exactly gotten around to asking.” “You barely know each other,” I said, “but of course that doesn’t mean anything.” “You see that, don’t you,” she said, “that it doesn’t mean a thing. I’ve always trusted your perceptions, Lois.”

  During the prolonged displaced courtship I had with Jay, I asked him a lot of questions about himself, which he seemed more than willing to answer. He seemed less curious about who I might be, but that may only have been because it was not the real me I had on the table. Of course he didn’t know that then.

  During lunch break, unable to cope with the wilted salad in front of me, I called Jay to ask his advice about Bill Worth’s invitation. “I’m in the middle of a sentence,” he said, “can I call you back?” “It’ll have to be in the evening,” I said, “when I get back from visiting Bill Worth’s place. I don’t take personal calls at work.”

  “I don’t like the idea of you going to Bill Worth’s place,” he said. He had called me back at the office despite what I said to him about personal calls. “I can’t talk now,” I said, “but I appreciate your brotherly advice.”

  Bill’s place was even more ostentatiously tasteful than I allowed myself to anticipate. It was also impeccably neat and, outside of the one room with book-lined walls, without much personal stamp. Even the paintings on the wall, mostly abstractions, some by painters whose names I didn’t have to go to art school to recognize, seemed relatively anonymous. In all, it was a set designer’s vision of a successful writer’s apartment. He offered me a glass of wine from what he said was a very good bottle and, after giving me ample time to drain my glass, asked if I’d like to go to bed with him. I said, “No,” and that was it. The subject was never mentioned again, though it was not an especially long visit.
Forty minutes later when he saw me to the door, the feeling in the room was that he had been the one to turn me down.

  That night, latish, after my uneventful visit to Bill Worth’s Village apartment, Jay called, wanting to know if my virtue was still intact. He asked in fact if I was all right, but what else might that mean? “Why this concern?” I asked.

  “I feel protective toward you,” he said.

  How would I have felt if Bill Worth hadn’t asked? I wondered. Would I have lied to Jay had I accepted Bill Worth’s offer? Questions concerning roads not taken tend to occupy me long after those roads are no longer on my map.

  Jay was ten minutes late for our luncheon date at the Terror, a recently opened Middle Eastern restaurant with a provocative menu three blocks from work. Fortunately, I had a manuscript with me to edit, and I was marking it up with outraged queries to pass the time. When a man arrived, conspicuously out of breath from apparent running, I barely noticed his sliding into the seat opposite me, or at least I gave a good imitation of not noticing. We each waited for the other to introduce the not easily definable subject that occasioned this meeting.