Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

I am not ready to accept your offer, or perhaps I am more than ready to accept it, and I walk along with you, our arms avoiding touch and brushing almost simultaneously, to the nearest subway.

“Look, it’s too nice a day to go into the subway,” you say. “Why don’t we take a cab. It’ll be my treat.”

You don’t wait for me to respond to your offer — I’ve not said a word in the fifteen minutes or so following my escape from the dentist’s — but hail the first cab you see, which stops for us as if prearranged and before I can access my intention I am following you up the steps to your fifth floor brownstone apartment.

As you unlatch the door with your key, I glance at my watch, an habitual gesture to no purpose, which you acknowledge with a corner of the mouth smile.

Your place, not at all what I imagined, has a minimalist rooming-house demeanor and exemplifies a casual disregard for the conventional verities of middle class/bohemian taste. I need to say something to cover my surprise, which is at first negative then something else, a kind of admiration bordering on awe.

“You make interesting use of the space,” I say, my speech barely intelligible, though I can feel the numbness beginning to recede.

“Do I?” you say, putting my jacket in the closet. “A lot of my stuff is still in boxes … Do you have any food issues?”

“Issues?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t get what you said,” you say. “What I’m asking is, is there anything you don’t eat?”

“Dirt.” I say, which does not produce a smile.

In short order, you set the table in your eat-in kitchen and produce a chicken salad from the refrigerator swaddled in plastic wrap.

“Maybe we ought to wait a few minutes,” I say. “The Novocain hasn’t worn off yet.”

You nod to yourself, seem to repress a smile, and return the chicken salad to its former exile.

I should pause here to remark that nothing happens between us — my coming to your apartment, your making me lunch, my inability to eat the chicken salad you offer — that leads or seems to lead to our going to bed together for the first time.

Nevertheless it happens even though I am unable to chart the exact course that carries us from A to B or A to C or A to Z or whatever it is that represents our interlude in your bed before or after or instead of lunch.

And so, after all the elusive elevator rides, after my long-standing tentative and failed pursuit, we get it together, we make love, as a time killer until I regain enough feeling in my mouth to get through the main agenda of lunch.

In place of lunch, the sex aside, we share a glass of white wine and a cigarette.

Afterward, when I am about to leave, you say, “Look, this won’t happen again. I want you to know that so there’ll be no misunderstanding down the road.”

Before you say this, I am already in another place in regard to you. “Was I that much of a disappointment?” I ask.

“To the contrary,” you say. “If we’re going to remain friends, and I really want us to be friends, I promise you I do, you’ll have to accept my terms.”

“Do I get an explanation?”

“There is none,” you say after a moment of what I hope might be reconsideration. “For the record — is getting into my pants the only thing that interests you about me?”

And then I have this flash that you and Deidre have set me up, that it is all prearranged including the sex, and I elect not to play your game. “The only thing,” I say.

“What?” Disbelief.

I resist the impulse to explain myself, to say it is the only possible answer to your outrageous question. Instead, I collect my jacket from the closet. When I turn around, you are folded up on the couch, your head nestled into your arms like a bird, silently crying or offering your audience that impression.

I stop at the door and look back, torn between wanting to get away and wanting to comfort you.

The second option chooses me and I squat down on the edge of the couch and stroke your hair. And stroke your hair.

Finally, you lift your head in a kind of slow motion, turning it just enough to glance in my direction. “Please leave,” you say.

I think of myself, dignity in hand, getting up from my corner of the couch. In my imagination I am walking to the door, unlatching it, opening it, closing it quietly behind me, bounding down the four flights of stairs to the street, hoping to outrun the depression that beggars onto my sleeve as I go.

In fact, in the unimagined world, I don’t move.

Iam in your bed, your back to my side, fiddling with the Double Crostic puzzle in the Sunday Times Magazine , when you turn toward me, propped on an elbow (last I looked you were asleep) and say without context, “Don’t you think that if you have been betrayed more than twice in your life, you have no one to blame but yourself?” You issue this provocative remark an hour or so after we have tangled, tangoed, on your Swedish bed and shortly before you confide that I am not the only man in your life.

I assume that when you make the betrayal pronouncement that you are referring to me while, as it turns out, it is about the other. “Roger gets off on being betrayed,” you say. “I’m afraid his life would feel incomplete to him without it.”

“Does he?” I say

“Yes, I would say so,” you say.

I am about to ask why you presume to know that I have a history of being betrayed — do I? I wonder — when you confess that you have been dating this guy, Roger, off and on for over seven years. Our connection has only a nine-months duration, though I have more invested in it than I like to admit.

“Why have you brought this up now?” I ask.

“Because I hate lying and liars,” you declaim as if performing before a TV camera.

“But why now? Why not after we made love for the first time? Why not last week, say?”

You rub your face against mine like a cat before answering. “I suppose I was afraid I’d lose you,” you say.

Had you not brought up the issue of betrayal as such, I might have been able to accept your confession with better grace. Getting betrayed, that is knowing you’ve been deceived, is not easy to accept. I have been unhappily on both sides of that equilibrium.

Let’s flash back to the week before when you offer me another kind of confession altogether. You mention with touching shyness as if it’s a dangerous admission that you love me. You make this confession twice actually in the same night — once in the throes and again about two hours later when I reenter your bed after a turn in the bathroom.

When you tell me that you love me — the second time in particular — it is as though a windfall of grace has entered my life. And for an unguarded moment, I am aware, anxiously aware, of being happy.

It is not inconceivable that you have had a similar conversation with Roger the day before or ten months ago, which vitiates my hopeful moment, perhaps erases it altogether.

Roger is, among other things, an architect. We might have some history together, but I no longer remember what it is. You met him, you tell me, when his firm renovated your weekend house in Vermont. A wife, later to be former, was somewhere offstage.

This much is relatively clear: my role in your life is to be the unwitting agent of Roger’s betrayal, for which Roger, who is addicted to being betrayed, is conveniently responsible.

All this is playing in my head when I get up from your Swedish orthopedic queen-size bed — I am wearing a T-shirt and nothing else — and put on my pants. I have no idea how angry I am until you ask why I am leaving.

“I thought I might call this other woman I haven’t seen in a while,” I say.