Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

“Oh,” I say. “That must explain it.”

“Are you being sarcastic, sweetie?” you ask. “I’m not responsible for you being asleep, am I? I’m going to make a pot of coffee if the interrogation is over.”

The interrogation, as you call it, isn’t over, but you don’t wait for my permission to leave. “Wait a second,” I say to your back or imagine myself saying.

In the bathroom, I am assaulted by the weary, unsympathetic image that peers back from the mirror. The toothbrush I use when I stay over is not in its usual place and, after looking through the medicine cabinet to no avail, I brush my teeth with my finger. As I leave the bathroom, Roger, who is standing outside the door awaiting his turn, insists on shaking my hand.

I have to get out of there immediately, I tell myself, working up a sense of urgency some part of me continues to resist.

No matter, I stay for breakfast — you have made blueberry pancakes with sausage and grits on the side. The temptation of the pancakes gets the better of my internal alarm.

I end up sitting directly across from Roger with you at the head of the table. “What do you guys want to do today?” you ask.

I know I have something else on for today, though I can’t remember — it seems symptomatic of a larger failure — what that something else might be.

“Sorry,” I say, getting up. “I have other plans.”

“Really?” you say. “What are these other plans?”

I wave off your presumptuous question. “Something I set up awhile back.”

“Well, if you can’t come up with a better excuse than that,” you say, “I don’t see why we should let you off.”

Roger guffaws with his mouth full of food — blueberries no doubt, but it looks like he’s spitting blood — catching the spray by rushing his napkin to his face.

“You know what I’d like to do,” Roger says. “I’d like to see the Pollock show at the Modern. I’ve seen it once but I think a second visit will more than repay itself.”

“The Modern tends to have long lines on Sunday,” you say, “and I know our friend here hates crowds.”

“Your friend here has a previous appointment,” I say.

“Absolutely,” you say. “How could I have forgotten? I just thought, not important really, that it would be nice for the three of us to do something together.”

Nice!? I have no idea what’s going on with you. In any event, I am making my way to the door.

I glance back at Roger while you are doing your number and he seems to be smiling bravely, unaware that his face can be read, through barely endurable pain.

I come home to my lonely apartment after spending the long escapeless day, parading through museums so crowded that someone’s head has morphed into almost every artwork.

The following e-mail arrives Monday morning.

Wasn’t Sunday an extraordinary day!

We must all do it again soon.

Roger

His note makes me want to put my fist through the wall, though I can’t (or won’t) say exactly why.

Two weeks later when you call to invite me to dinner for “just the two of us,” I have to ask you to repeat your invitation before I can wrap my mind around it.

“Gee, I hope you’re not mad at me,” you say. “You know appearances are not always what they seem. You just need to have more trust in people.”

“I trust appearances,” I say.

“Please don’t be clever at my expense, OK? If you don’t want to come to dinner, just say so. I’m not going to fall apart.”

I have already fallen apart, but it isn’t anything I care to admit to you so I stall for time, hoping to intuit which of my choices, once irrevocably made, would be the less regrettable. “I may have a prior appointment,” I say. “I’ll have to look in my book.”

“So you won’t come — is that what you’re telling me?”

“I’ll see if I can get out of it and call you back,” I say.

“I don’t want to be the cause of someone else’s disappointment,” you say. “We’ll do it another time.”

“The appointment was made so long ago,” I say, “I’m not sure if it’s still in place.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll call you back within two hours,” I say.

“If you do, you do. I won’t hold my breath.”

My first impulse after I hang up is to call back (after a suitable delay) and accept your invitation, though some whisper of dignity rises in me to refuse.

To escape a decision I seem unable to make, I go out for a walk in the night air, end up at the Brass Bar, linger over two beers, trade quips with the bartender who is an aspiring stand-up comic, and faze out on a hockey game on TV as if I were watching a series of fast moving abstractions reconfigure themselves.

An hour and twenty minutes pass and I become increasing obsessed with the arbitrary two hour deadline I have given you for my decision.

Although I might have called you from the bar, I rush home. A half block from my apartment, I see you, or think I do, hurrying toward me.

This makes everything all right until I discover it is someone else, a different shadow. The stranger, an Asian woman who may or may not be a streetwalker, asks me for a cigarette and for a moment I imagine myself going off with her and we end up dancing together in her one-room apartment, the wall space covered by posters from The Wizard of Oz .

“Sorry, I don’t smoke,” I say.

“I usually don’t make that mistake,” she says.

When I get inside my own place and remove my jacket, leaving it on the chair near the phone, it is five minutes short of the two hour deadline. By the time I dial your number and, in doing so, revise my decision yet again, two more minutes have passed.

I get a busy signal then wait thirty seconds and push redial. The same message repeats itself.

Again: busy.

Your circumstantial unavailability fuels a self-induced anxiety.

I can imagine you saying, “I held the invitation two hours for you, which you asked for, right? But your time has elapsed and so I made other plans.”

Anyway, I dial your number again, not trusting the redial to do its job, and this time it rings. I know you are there because only five minutes ago, the line was busy, but the phone keeps ringing without event — at least seven times to my hasty count — and then your recorded message breaks the pattern.

And then, as I am about to say that I am free to come to dinner, that I am looking forward to seeing you, the phone goes dead. What is that about?

I dial again, assuming that you were momentarily indisposed, assuming whatever I can to justify the unlikely, and I get another busy signal. In childish pique (see, I do not disguise my shortcomings), I hurl the phone across the room, watch it land unharmed on the couch.

I have small — very small — tolerance for frustration and, though alone (unseen except by the reader), I am nevertheless embarrassed by my behavior.

One more try, I tell myself. and that’s it. This is my last call.

On the third (or fourth) ring, a man answers (it may even be a wrong number) and I hang up without speaking in a blind rage that takes a long time, months perhaps, even years to resolve.

The next time we meet is in another country — Paris, as a matter of fact, the city of love (or is it light?) — at my brother’s wedding to your half-sister. In the intervening three years, during which I publish my third book (a modestly reviewed meditation on war called The Lion’s Share ) I think of you no more than five or six times. From the moment I discover you, I try to catch your eye, but you never turn in my direction, seem occupied by the details of the ceremony or perhaps preoccupied in private reverie.