Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

It’s not that I don’t consider going to see the Anthony Mann thriller in the film noir series in the smaller theater. It’s just that I end up following the two of you in, which includes entering the same aisle and taking the seat next to yours with Roger on the other side of you. I say end up, though of course no one forces me to follow you into the row you’ve chosen for us.

When your arm brushes mine, I take my elbow off the arm rest and drop it on my leg like a piece of discarded clothing.

I watch the movie, which is about a married woman taking out a personals ad in order to find a man for her reticent unmarried friend and then meeting with one of the respondents in a succession of dates while pretending to be someone she’s not.

You seem to me at the moment like the heroine of the film, a perception I immediately distrust, in certain not easily definable ways.

I can’t say who initiates the gesture but we hold hands secretively for a while, your hand withdrawn as the film fades into the titles.

We end up at a café a few blocks from the theater and use the movie to talk in coded ways about the tensions inherent in our immediate situation. Roger, for example, sees the movie as a study in betrayal.

You play us off for the most part with casual even-handedness, though I sense (perhaps mistakenly) that you prefer me to Roger. Once this perception locks in, virtually everything you do provides further evidence for my certainty. At some point, I find myself outraged on Roger’s behalf — this is not the you I care about — made uneasy by your casually dismissive treatment of him.

Preferred or not, I am the one that gets up to leave.

“Why don’t you come back with us,” you say. “I believe I have enough food in the fridge to make dinner for three.”

“Thank you for the offer,” I say — how grotesquely polite we all are—“but I have other plans. Anyway, I’m sure that Roger, though too civilized to say so, doesn’t want me intruding on his date.”

“I’d be happy to have you join us,” Roger says.

So. The odd couple plus one trudge over to your apartment, though the sidewalk isn’t wide enough to walk three abreast and I find myself, as much by choice as circumstance, pulling up the rear like an orphan.

Once in your apartment, we discover that there is less food in your refrigerator than estimated. The notion that you are prepared to cook a meal for us should have set off an alarm. When I first met you, you used to boast that you never put heat to food unless under duress, though other times you complained wistfully of how you liked the idea of cooking and wished you had more gift for it.

Instead of having dinner, we drink brandy and nibble on hors d’oeuvres left over from an old party — a near rancid tapenade on wheat thins — and watch a French movie about cannibalism in Paris on IFC. Before the bloodshed starts, Roger dozes off on the couch and you mute the sound on the TV and we make conversation in counterpoint to the gory images in hushed voices.

“You’re looking very fetching tonight,” I say.

“You just want to get laid,” you say.

When the movie concludes — there are English subtitles so the lack of sound makes it neither more nor less incoherent — we help Roger into the guest room, take off his shoes and pants and slip him under the cover like a family secret.

I go into the bathroom and throw water on my face, in private unresolved debate on whether to take the subway or not, considering the difficulty in finding a taxi on your street at 1 a.m.

“I’d invite you to share my bed,” you say, “but it doesn’t seem quite fair, does it, with Roger in the guest room. I’ll make up the couch for you.”

“I’m thinking of going home.”

“That’s just silly. You always stay over on Saturday night.”

There is something askew in what you say, but I am too unfocused to find the words to define my objection. You throw your arms around me and I take to be an inducement.

“I’m really not overjoyed with the idea of staying on your couch,” I hear myself say in a peevish voice hardly recognizable as my own.

“Not overjoyed, huh?” you say. “It was on our second date, if you remember — the night we went to see Mauricio Pollini at Carnegie Hall — that we used the couch to make our own recital. I don’t recall any objections that night.”

“That was a more innocent time,” I say, though I have no recollection of the event you cite. I never went to a Pollini recital with you at Carnegie Hall.

“While you are making your mind up, I’m going to brush my teeth if you have no objections. I believe you know where the sheets are if you want to make up the couch yourself.”

I pick up the Times crossword puzzle from the foot of the couch while you are in the bathroom — you have completed about a third of it — and scan it with a pen in my hand, resisting an impulse to correct a mistake.

You yank the paper from me when you return, saying you were planning to finish the puzzle yourself for God’s sake. I almost grab it back, which is one of the few unexamined impulses I resist that night.

“All right,” you say, “you can come into the bedroom if you insist but no sex, OK? I want your word on that.”

“No sex,” I say.

“You promise?”

“I don’t promise.”

“OK then.”

We have both been drinking steadily for about three hours at that juncture so we have a built-in excuse for irresponsible behavior.

Anyway, I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, though I am distantly aware of you lying next to me in your satiny purple nightgown, your thigh brushing the back of my hand.

I dream of burrowing my face into some woman’s swollen (pregnant?) stomach — she is your sister in the dream, a near twin, someone whose existence you’ve kept from me — and wake to find myself alone in your bed. After a moment of figuring out where I am, I make my way to the bathroom.

I pee for what seems like five minutes — it’s as if I’ve sprung this endless leak — all the time wondering where you might be. Challenged by your absence, I find my way into the kitchen, which has a small light over the sink, a kind of night-light for dirty dishes. Sure enough there is your scary cat, an oversized, long-haired feral tabby perched on the dishwasher, staring balefully at me, but no sign of you.

I pad back into the bedroom, thinking maybe you have returned in my absence. There are lots of shadows in the dark room, which suggest the possibility of a human form, and I take the trouble to whisper your name, a ghostly call that goes unanswered.

There is only one other place you might be and I refuse to acknowledge the possibility.

I put on my pants — I had been sleeping in my underwear — and sit hunkered over on the edge of the bed, wondering if I have it in me to get back to sleep. I close my eyes and imagine you standing over me, your fingers brushing my lips.

When I hear a murmur of voices — it may be from the apartment upstairs or the loose wiring in my head — I leave the room again to check out their source.

At that moment, the door to the guest room opens mysteriously and a shadowy figure emerges from the darkness. You are wearing a flimsy pale green robe over your satin nightgown.

“What’s going on?” you ask me.

“I might have asked the same question,” I say.

“I was just checking to see if Roger was all right,” you say.

“Was he?”

“Oh yes.”

“No surprise there.”

“Don’t be ugly, sweetie,” you say. “I spent most of the night in bed with you, didn’t I?”

“Did you? I don’t remember much of what went on.”

“You were asleep,” you whisper. “You slept like a stone.”