Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

At the reception that follows, one thing or another keeps me from approaching you, an ongoing intention unobtrusively thwarted. I have the sense on no evidence beyond the fact that circumstance never brings you close to my side that you’re willfully avoiding me.

I am the only one of my brother’s family present for the occasion and, from what I can make out, one of the few Americans at hand. You are there with several people, perhaps one of them your husband, and appear to be an intimate of the bride. It is only later that I discover that there is a family connection as well — you share, or so everyone says, the same absent father.

For a moment, I catch your eye and wav and you make an ambiguous face at me in return, mocking, petulant, self-parodying, impossible to decipher.

I begin to wonder if it is really you and not some uncanny lookalike when the bride’s mother sidles up to me and asks if I would be so kind — the request elaborate and, under the circumstances, unrefusable. She is asking me to dance with her.

It is not what I want to do and I make an awkward excuse or two (bad hip, naturally clumsy), which she steadfastly ignores, before leading her on to the floor.

“My name is Madeleine,” she says in barely accented English. “I want to hear much about you. Are you a true person like your frére?”

What can I say? Whatever I come up with is bound to seem either boastful or self-deprecating or some embarrassing combination of the two. “The question that had been on my mind,” I say, the first of several mistakes I make that evening, “is whether the mother is as beautiful as the daughter and that is already answered before I ask it.”

“ Je ne comprends,” you say. “I am or I am not?”

“You are of course,” I say.

“Oo la la,” you say. “Certainly not. It is a cruel compliment because so patently false and insincere.” All this is said as if she meant something else — not easy to say what that else might be — altogether. We finish the dance in relative silence, and I have the sense that I have disappointed Madeleine’s expectations.

“ Merci, monsieur, ” Madeleine says when the music has stopped. “Thank you, Donald’s brother, for indulging the whim of an older woman.”

“My pleasure,” I say and Madeleine laughs as if we shared some private joke, and waltzes off, aware of an audience, to greet whomever’s next on her agenda.

I spot you at one of the hors d’oeuvres tables and I come up on you from behind and wait with willed patience for you to acknowledge me.

“Not here,” you say without turning around. “Later.”

“When?” I ask.

“Go away,” you say, and I do.

It comes out while I am paying my respects to the married couple that the bride is your half-sister on your father’s side and that the two of you have become fast friends on short acquaintance.

“I’m sorry your dad couldn’t join us,” the bride says.

“He’s also sorry,” I say to which my brother, standing behind the bride, rolls his eyes.

The reason our father is not at the wedding is because my brother is not speaking to him, but apparently that is not the story in circulation.

Madeleine appears and asks me if I need a place to stay for the night and I have trouble remembering if other arrangements were made and I say I don’t know.

“Of course you’ll stay with us,” Madeleine says. “I’m not sure who else I’ve committed to, but we’ll find out soon enough.”

Dinner comes first and I drift off with what appears to be an insider group which includes Donald and his bride, Madeleine and her fourth husband, Bruno, and you and your date among others. You still have not quite acknowledged me.

During dinner at trendy Soixante-neuf, it strikes me that I left my overnight case in the closet of the reception hall or perhaps in the trunk of a taxi en route to the restaurant. My anxiety at its loss slips away after my second glass of wine.

Just as the dessert course arrives, as if it were their cue, Donald and Lola slip off on their honeymoon. When they are gone, Madeleine, who is at the head of the table, gives an audible sigh of relief.

Then I find myself sitting on a jump seat in an overcrowded taxi with Madeleine and Bruno, you and your date (whose name I understand is Roget) traveling to Madeleine’s house in the thirteenth arrondisement .

When we arrive, there are some other wedding guests waiting at the door to whom Madeleine has also promised lodging for the night. We congregate in the living room to wait for our assignments.

A mathematical problem ensues. There are four guest bedrooms in Madeleine’s charming, somewhat cluttered house, and nine people to accommodate.

It makes sense of course to award the bedrooms to the couples, which leaves me, the only single on the scene, odd man out.

“I have a perfectly comfortable folding cot,” Madeleine says, first in French then in English. “The question is, where do we locate this cot?”

“I appreciate your concern,” I say, “but it’s no problem for me to stay at a hotel.”

“I will take it as an insult if you leave,” she says, “and I am not one, I promise you, quick to forgive.”

To avoid seeming difficult, I offer to spend the night on the living room couch.

“I wouldn’t think of it,” Madeleine says. “Not at all. I will put a screen between us to give you intimacy. You will stay in my room.”

“I think you mean privacy,” I say.

“Do I?” Madeleine says. “Of course.”

Everyone by this time has gone off to their assigned rooms except you and your date. During the preceding conversation, you have been browsing through the bookshelves that line the walls with the kind of concentration that seems to shut everything out so I am taken aback when you turn and say, “As always, Madeleine, you are too kind for your own good. This is your house and you have a right to be comfortable in it. So let me make a counter suggestion.”

“Such as?” Madeleine says, perplexed as we all are by your unexpected intervention.

“We can just as easily install your lovely screen in the room Roget and I will be staying in,” you say.

“I wouldn’t hear of it,” Madeleine says. “The matter is settled.”

“Really, Madeleine,” you say, “it makes no one happy to have you martyr yourself. Roget and I would be pleased to share our room in your lovely house with Donald’s brother.”

The debate between the two women goes on for longer than needs to be described and I watch like a spectator with only a marginal rooting interest in the outcome.

I am uncomfortably aware, though I have no idea of the history behind it, that the two of you have no love for one another.

At some point, Roget comes over to you, puts his hand on your arm and says in French — the following an estimate of his remarks—“This is Madeleine’s house, dear, and the decision where a guest will be put up should be hers to make.” He says this in a quiet voice but you push him away and whisper what I imagine to be the French equivalent of fuck off.

Roget turns to me and shrugs.

“Oo la la,” Madeleine says. And then, turning in my direction, adds, “You decide please.”

The narrow-eyed stare she gives me has a different message altogether. It is as if she is daring me to refuse her and if I dare, I fall beyond the pale of her forebearance. She will not, perhaps never, forgive me.

“Whatever you decide is fine,” I say, trying to occupy an ephemeral middle ground that probably does not exist.

“Then it is decided,” Madeleine says, “I’ll get the cot for you and some linen.” She sweeps out of the room in modest triumph.

Roget seems relieved, but you ask him, virtually order him, to go to the kitchen and get you a glass of white wine.