You, or the Invention of Memory

by Jonathan Baumbach

  “I’ve missed our lunches together,” he eventually said, an intrusion on our discussion of some movie we had separately seen.

  “I don’t know if I missed you or not,” I said.

  “If you don’t know then you probably haven’t,” he said as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

  I couldn’t help contrasting Jay’s reaction to Bill Worth’s. Bill Worth didn’t really care a lot whether I accepted his proposition or not. You couldn’t reject him in that situation because there wasn’t enough of him at risk. On the other hand, Jay’s apparent cool was obviously worked-up. Though I might respect a man who showed his vulnerability, I was never particularly attracted to whatever it was disguised as indifference.

  I had the sense, like a buzz at the back of the neck, that I would say something to Jay—that it would flame from my mouth without premeditation—something so unforgivable that he would get up and leave the table and never talk to me again.

  “What if,” I said, “what if I told you I had slept with Bill Worth? Would we be here now drinking watery coffee?”

  “Did you?” He took his glasses off to unleash his X-ray vision.

  “Have you been sleeping with my sister?”

  “What does your sister tell you?”

  “We don’t discuss you in that way. I suppose I don’t want to know the answer or I know it already and don’t want to think about it.”

  “So you slept with Bill Worth to get back at me for being with your sister, which, let me remind you, was your project in the first place.”

  “But I said I didn’t sleep with Bill Worth.”

  He held out his hand and I grabbed on to it before it got away, a gesture in complete opposition to what I was feeling about him at the moment.

  “Where does this leave us?” he said.

  “Well,” I said,” I’m not going to go to bed with you if that’s what you think.” In taking back my hand, I jarred my coffee cup with my elbow, about half of the cup overflowing its bounds sopping paper napkins in its wake.

  “Why don’t you just throw the coffee in my face?” he said, getting up, dropping some money on the table and walking out in a way that begged for a recall.

  “Bill Worth’s is bigger than yours,” I called after him, turning at least one waitress’s head.

  That night, unable to sleep, I called my sister’s number and hung up when Jay answered. My memory is short. But I couldn’t remember having behaved so badly before. There were two consolations. One, that Jay was to blame, and two, that I secretly knew that I was a better person than the one on display.

  A week later, Lorrie called and caught me in a less dangerous mood. It took twenty minutes of idle chatter before she found her way to the point of her call. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said. “Jay and I have decided it wasn’t meant to be.”

  I felt immediately sympathetic and inexplicably anxious. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “I appreciate your saying that,” she said. “I felt bad because you gave him to me as a kind of gift and I think it’s just terrible to throw a gift back in the giver’s face, but I think he preferred your imitation of me to the real thing. We were never really on the same wavelength.”

  “I don’t think I ever understood what that expression means,” I said.

  When Lorrie took pains to explain the expression to me, I knew she wasn’t suffering Jay’s loss to any terrible extent. “Would you mind a lot if I dated Jay?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “I might. Could you at least wait a couple of months?”

  I thought I could, but when it came down to it I couldn’t. My plan was to let a month pass and then take it from there, call him or e-mail him, depending on how I felt at the time. It seemed to me a reasonable plan and I probably would have held to it if I hadn’t impatiently phoned him three days after Lorrie reported their split. It was not a random headstrong act, my call. I woke up during the night, taken in hand by a dream in which Jay came to the door to sell me the O-Z volume of an anatomical encyclopedia, which I refused to buy unless the A-N was also included. I asked myself: Why would Jay have broken up with Lorrie so soon after our edgy lunch unless he was sending me a message? The message, as I read it, was, “I’m available to you.” It seemed only good manners to respond.

  I had to call three times before I circumvented his answering machine and even when I got him live so to speak, my first impulse was to return the phone gently to its cradle. In answer to his bored “Hello,” I said in a somewhat accusing voice, “Why have you broken with my sister?” And then, listening to myself in echo, I laughed crazily.

  “Are you asking for yourself,” he said, “or as a spokesperson for the local chapter of the dating police?”

  “I won’t do anything that will hurt my sister,” I said. “If we’re going to see each other—is that what you want? I hope so because it’s what I want—we’re going to have to be circumspect for a while. I hate lying, I do, but I don’t want to hurt Lorrie. Do you want to come by tonight? There’s a Moroccan takeout down the street that three different people have recommended to me.”

  He didn’t answer right away, which I never quite forgave him for. “Am I really smaller than Bill Worth?” he said.

  “Oh come on,” I said. “I never saw Bill Worth’s. I was just …”

  For three weeks or so, we got away with it or at least no one—certainly not Lorrie—let me know she knew what was going on. Many of our mutual acquaintances assumed she and Jay were still an item and it wasn’t my business, was it, to tell anyone it wasn’t so. My semi-regular conversations with Lorrie probably showed some strain, though Lorrie for her own reasons refused to notice. It was our habit to touch base virtually every other day and eventually Jay’s name popped up, Lorrie going back and forth in her feelings about him, mostly glad it was over, wishing he would call some time, aggrieved that he hadn’t cared enough to try to patch things up. When she talked against him, even mildly, which was Lorrie’s style, it was all I could do not to argue in his defense.

  Deceiving your own sister is no fun or too much guilty pleasure for any decent person to acknowledge her exhilaration.

  I didn’t believe I was doing anything wrong, but I longed to confess, wrote Lorrie an apologetic letter which I very nearly posted.

  In the end it was Roger who blew the whistle, mentioning it to Lorrie as a by the way, assuming (so he said) that she already knew.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever talk to you again,” Lorrie said to me on the blower and then stayed on another fifteen minutes to chat.

  Right after Lorrie found out about us and stopped talking to me (except those times when she absolutely couldn’t avoid it), Jay and I had a series of fights leading to a period of estrangement—a kind of irrevocable breakup—that lasted eight days by my count and nine by his.

  We broke up again a few months later—this time for two weeks, a period in which we both dated other people—and after that we talked about moving in together.

  There was a lot of possibly unfounded distrust going on between us, often taking the form of jealousy, and for our first six months together we kept looking for evidence (and finding it) of betrayal and bad faith. One thing I had come to know about myself was that if I didn’t even the score with someone who had done me wrong (the melodramatic phrase says it all) I would be unforgivingly unhappy with us both.

  It was an intuitive thing. I lived my life as if reprisal, or the threat thereof, was a necessary deterrent to betrayal.

  An example: When Jay told me some old flame of his has invited him to lunch to ask his advice about some live-in boyfriend who no longer lived-in. I said it would make me unhappy if he went to this lunch.

  “I’m not going to break this appointment because you’re unreasonably jealous,” he said. “I promise you it’s just advice she wants from me.”

  “You don’t have to go,” I said. “You can’t be the only source of wisdom in her life.”

 
; “I can’t not go just because you don’t want me to,” he said.

  I didn’t understand why not and remain to this day thoroughly puzzled by his explanation.

  So when he went to lunch with Francesca—I believe that was her name—I called Bill Worth at his unlisted number and teased another invitation from him to his apartment. After soliciting the invitation, I couldn’t in clear conscience turn him down a second time, could I?

  Some time later, wanting to heal the rift I confessed the Bill Worth episode. “I did it because you went to lunch with thing,” I said.

  We were walking in the street at the time, going to a dinner party at our friends, the Powers, and Jay turned his back on me and crossed the street. I crossed over, and when I caught up, put my arm around his shoulder, regretting everything particularly my confession. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “but you know it didn’t matter.”

  “I didn’t sleep with Francesca,” he said.

  “But you might have,” I said. “She probably wanted you to. You probably wanted to yourself.”

  He pulled away and stomped on ahead and I trailed behind as if we were attached by invisible wires.

  We rode different elevators up to the party, or Jay walked up—I forget (I forget a lot of things)—the point being that we didn’t talk all night. Or the next day either.

  While I was at work, I called him at the place we shared, not to check up on him—that was not my intent the first time around—and got no answer. I called at a time he was almost always at his desk, writing—it was his habit, his willed commitment, to sit in front of his word processor for four hours every morning—so his not being there had its ominous aspect. I waited an hour, though it was a closing day on The Magazine and I didn’t have time for craziness, and then tried to reach him a second time, and a third, and a fourth. So he was out and about, getting back at me. It wasn’t so much that I was furious at him, which I suppose I was, as I was mortally disappointed. I mean, this is a man who has his hero say in a novel, “Everything is forgivable.” On the other hand, I tended to believe that what isn’t tolerable isn’t forgivable.

  I didn’t ask him where he had been. I saw no point in inviting further deception. Instead, I only pretended to leave for work in the morning and instead hung out at the subway station—anyway, I had some manuscripts to read—and sure enough at a few minutes after eleven o’clock he appeared. Jay rarely noticed his surroundings and this morning he was even more preoccupied than usual so I had no problem following him without his being aware of my shadowing presence.

  I was planning just to note the station he exited and then go on to work, but I had come this far so I got off the train—I had been in the car behind his—to see where the trail led. I had barely taken a step when he turned suddenly in my direction and came toward me, unaware of me until we were barely a foot apart. He seemed pleased to see me and we hugged before negotiating the issue of what each of us was doing there. My story was that I was meeting a writer but that I had confused the time. He offered no explanation, suggested we go somewhere for coffee.

  We walked with our arms around each other and I forgot, let myself forget, the reason for my being here. After coffee, we hugged as though we were separating after an illicit meeting, a desperate extended hug, and, in love, I went off to work at The Magazine and he went … wherever he went.

  And when we came back together at home at the end of the day, I asked him in an unguarded moment, a teasing smile on my face, if he had been meeting another woman when we ran into each other.

  He said, “Of course not,” and I wanted to believe him, I would have believed him, I almost believed him.

  “Then what were you doing on Chambers Street?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” he asked.

  “It matters if you refuse to tell me,” I said. All this was going on in a bantering, friendly way, though making me extremely anxious at the same time.

  “Maybe you’ll just have to trust me,” he said.

  “Or not,” I said. “What would you have said if I had said the same thing to you?”

  The conversation ended, as so many of them did the first year we lived together, when one or the other of us walked into the next room. It eased the tensions and made it possible for us to go on together.

  I told Leo of the difficulties Jay and I were experiencing and he asked—Leo had also been Jay’s therapist for a while—if I thought a joint session might be useful. I said it wasn’t something I was interested in pursuing right now.

  “Why is that?” he wanted to know.

  I had my reasons but I was not ready to share them with Leo, whose natural sympathies were with the male figure in the relationship.

  I bring this up now because Leo figures more importantly later in the story.

  So we had no family counseling from Leo and we failed to talk through our problems, but after the first year, after my sister forgave me and Roger came back into the fold as a friend, we settled into a routine of comforting conflict. Leo would say in later years that we swept our problems under the rug, but for a while there it seemed as if the metaphorical rug had kind of lifted off the ground on its own.

  Anyway, that’s my version of the story of how we got together.

  EIGHT

  ___

  This was the first (and she hoped, last) ad she took out in the Personals section of a magazine and she wanted to put her best foot forward without setting up her respondents for disappointment. This was the second draft: “40ish woman, sometimes thought beautiful, creative, cunning, quirky, with advanced degree in English literature, wants to meet intelligent man between 30 and 50, who listens more than he talks.” In the third draft, she dropped “sometimes,” replaced “cunning” and “quirky” with “original” and added “feeling” between “intelligent” and “man.” She also added, “Right wing zealots need not apply,” but then decided “intelligent” and “feeling”—maybe change feeling to humane—would obviate against closed-mindedness. Still, she barely recognized herself in the description she was issuing, which concerned her only for the limited time she thought about it.

  Before placing the ad, she called a few friends on the phone and read them the possibly final draft, writing down the best of the suggestions for improvement, though turning in the notice pretty much as was. As soon as the Personal was out of her hands, as soon as it appeared in the paper, the whole business filled her with revulsion. She vowed to herself not to pursue the matter.

  But when a few days passed and an envelope arrived with twenty-seven responses and two days after that, another with nineteen more, making it—addition had never been her strong suit—forty-five or forty-six in all, she piled them on her desk and began to read them like an eavesdropper or, more to the point, like an editor.

  Some she discarded after reading a line or two. An ax murderer with a good prose style was preferable in her view to an uninteresting mind. More often she read them from beginning to end and found herself mildly curious as to who the writer might really be behind the calculated disguise of his prose. She warmed to those writers who avoided salesmanship and were just a little self-deprecating. At some point she found herself sorting them into piles.

  The discards were filed away under the categories, Bores and Serial Killers, sometimes mutually inclusive. The third category, the survivors, found themselves under the all-purpose rubric: Others. She let a week pass before reassessing the nine surviving respondents.

  The first one she read, the one arbitrarily sitting at the top of her “Others” pile, moved her but she couldn’t say why afterward. When you looked at it with a cold eye, it seemed barely a cut above ordinary. She put it aside, then read two others that were much cleverer, and a fourth that had a distinctive if unlikable voice, then returned to the first.

  It was not so much the letter itself that needed revisiting as her uncharacteristically sentimental response to it. Its appeal was in the kind of risk the author seemed to take, though the letter was pseud
onymous, signed, of all things, “Lonely on Livingston Street.” The second (or was it third?) reading moved her almost as much as, perhaps even more than, the first, and she wrote an e-mail letter in response. She might have phoned—he had also given her his phone number—but it seemed appropriate to take small steps, small sure steps, rather than throw herself headlong into something she might later regret.

  Dear Lonely on Livingston Street (she wrote),

  I admired the directness and simplicity of your letter, and I was touched despite my native skepticism by your undisguised defenselessness. I will try to offer the same spirit of openness in return. Very few of the men I’ve known would have had the courage to make the kind of admissions you have openly offered in your letter. I know from personal experience how desolating loneliness can be, but it’s also important—I hope you see this as I do—to be independent and self-sufficient. Being with someone in a mutually-fulfilling relationship is desirable, but a relationship should not be used like wallpaper—you see that, don’t you?—over disintegrating walls. I’ve been there too. I’m beginning, I know, to sound a bit psycho-babblish here and I apologize or, to be wholly honest with you, don’t apologize. I am a bookish person who prefers movies to theater, chamber music to opera, conceptual art to traditional painting—I know what I like and my tastes tend to be passionate. Still, I try to be open whenever possible to what I don’t know. I have the capacity to change my mind, though sometimes it takes awhile. People tell me I am an intuitive person and it pleases me to think so. My politics tend to be liberal, but I also tend to vote the person—that’s the intuitive part—over the apparent issues. I come from Baptists on my mother’s side and atheists on my father’s and my own religious leanings lie somewhere in between if such an unlikely territory exists.

  If I sound like the kind of person you’d like to meet, I’d appreciate receiving another letter from you.