Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

“Didn’t I just say so.”

“You sound unconvinced,” I say. “How will I know it’s you?”

He laughs which breaks up into a cough. “I’ll find you, buddy.”

At a little after four on Thursday, I make my way to the Brass Bar, a six-block walk from my apartment, after deciding, during a night of fragmentary dreams — one in which I find a translucent baby hiding out in the sock drawer of my dresser — not to bother.

I look around before taking a booth — the place is uncharacteristically half-empty and ominously silent — but recognize no one who even remotely resembles Roger. None of the all-day topers at the bar return my glance.

I am relieved that Roger isn’t here and it suits my sense of irony that, after pushing for this meeting, he is the one not to show up.

A minute or so after I make myself at home in an empty booth — it’s almost as if no time has passed — a man about my height and weight, though notably older and without a beard, slides carelessly into the seat across from me.

His arrival thwarts me. In the story I’ve already written in my head, Roger does not materialize.

Without acknowledging me, he explains his delay. “Something came up at the last minute — I actually had my coat on at the time — one of those crisis-creating, unsolvable problems. I couldn’t pull myself away until I did.”

There’s something familiar and annoying about his manner. “We’ve met before, I think, haven’t we?”

“I recognized you the moment I came in the door, though it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve met. I’m sure you know what I mean, no? We may have met but it would have been a long time ago.”

An image of a younger Roger — he actually looks like an older version of the baby in my sock drawer — comes to mind. “Didn’t we once, maybe four years ago, maybe five, play in a doubles game at the Wall Street Racquet Club?”

“Not likely. I haven’t played tennis since I started having problems with my back.”

“Lower back? Predominantly on the left side?”

“Right side.”

“I remember you had an unorthodox serve that was inexcusably effective.”

“Would it were so. My serve, even before my back went out, had been inexcusably ineffective. And it was nothing if not orthodox. I took lessons for almost as many years as I was in analysis. I’m sure you’re anxious to know why I asked for this meeting. It wasn’t to bounce around my tennis serve.”

“I remember now — it was your partner, Cyrus something, he was the one with the odd service motion. It was something like Jacques Tati’s serve in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday! ”

“The last time I played doubles, I partnered with a man named Sydney.”

And then for an almost five-minute stretch — the waiter interrupts whatever it is to take our order — neither of us has anything to say.

It is Roger who eventually breaks the silence. “I have to say you’re not at all what I expected.” He wags his head at me in reproof.

“How so?”

He shrugs. “For starters, and please don’t take this the wrong way, I can’t begin to imagine what our mutual friend sees in you. I expected someone better looking with more charisma. No offense.”

“Only a little taken.”

“Look, I had asked to meet you because I thought — I’m not even sure I’m saying this the right way — that we might make common cause … Look, it’s a dumb idea. I already regret bringing it up.”

“The common cause thing, you mean concerning …?” And I mention your name. “Anyway, I’m out of the picture.”

The name, which I’m committed not to divulge in this text, enlists a sigh, perhaps even an accompanying blush. “Yes and no,” he says, then he confides with a kind of hollow bravado that he has made up his mind to end his relationship with you.

By this time, people are standing two and three deep at the bar and the booths are filling up, which makes it prohibitively hard to hear someone across from you murmuring, particularly someone like Roger who tends to make conversation as if the listener were an eavesdropper on his introspection.

So I can’t vouch for the accuracy of what remains of our conversation. Occasionally your name resounds through the din and the word “love,” but not the connecting context. “I have no illusions,” I hear him say, a rueful boast. “At my age, what’s the point?”

“I hear you,” I say, meaning less and more than it suggests.

He leans forward in a confiding posture. “I knew as soon as I saw you that you were someone I could talk to without the usual self-regarding bullshit. I trashed a marriage of sixteen-years duration to be with her. I have a daughter — she’ll be graduating Yale at the end of the year — who has never quite forgiven me and whose life is a disaster area because of my divorce from her mother. So you can understand why I have an outsized investment in this relationship and I’ve hung in like a trooper until now, until last week, when a less obsessional person would have long since cut his losses.”

“I’ve been in situations like …,” I start to say, but he interrupts before I can finish the thought.

“On three different occasions I asked { } to marry me. It was in response to my third proposal that she told me there was someone else. The someone else of course was you. I told myself: Roger, don’t be an asshole, you’ll never get what you want from her, but still I couldn’t let go. It was only after I talked to my nutritionist, who serves as an all-purpose advisor, that I found the inner strength to end it.”

“Have you told her of your decision?”

“Tonight … Is it true that you’re no longer diddling her?”

Maybe he doesn’t say diddling — there is wall-to-wall noise in the bar — but it is something like it, meaning approximately the same thing. My impulse is to console him, but I merely nod.

“It would be a nice irony if she lost us both.”

I begin to see what you mean by Roger being responsible for the betrayals in his life. His occasional assertiveness is a form of disguise. Something in his manner, something deceptively subtle, asks the casual acquaintance to take advantage of him.

“If neither of us is seeing her,” I say, “then her game, if game is the word for it, has been self-defeating. Wouldn’t you say?”

“I have to go,” he says abruptly, extending his hand as an afterthought.

I do not say that I am pleased to have met him.

We make no arrangements to meet again.

A month or so after the meeting with Roger, I run into you on the street in front of the Film Forum. At first sighting, I am spectacularly glad to see you. You keep your distance, which disappoints me, act as if you haven’t noticed my presence. To protect you, or to protect myself, I also look away.

Then, with a kind of abrupt determination, you come over, calling my name as you approach.

“You’re looking the same,” you say as if years have passed since we last saw each other. I kiss you awkwardly on the cheek, which you present as if it were the Pope’s ring, though in the next moment you wrap your arms around me and give me an extended hug.

“If you’re here by yourself,” you say, “why don’t you join us.”

“Us?”

“I’m meeting Roger,” you say.

“The endlessly betrayable Roger?”

“What?”

“Not worth repeating,” I say. “And how do you know we’re even planning to see the same movie?”

“You are here to see the Rohmer,” you say, winking at me. “Am I right?”

You are, though to defend myself from your presumptions I am prepared to deny it, when Roger ambles up to us.

“Look who I found,” you say.

Roger does not seem pleased at my presence, though he manages a wry, civilized smile, and offers his hand.