Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

I get up from the bed, leaving my coat somewhere in the pile, and edging my way through the crowd, nodding to the woman I had exchanged smiles with earlier in the evening, exit the party, summon the elevator and, without waiting for its arrival, scramble down nine flights to the lobby and then into the street, crossing my arms in front of me as a stay against the shock of the night air.

For the first block or so, I walk briskly, but then as I near the subway, I slow down as if all this desperate hurrying had tired me out. In fact, I avoid going into the subway and continue to walk downtown perhaps to the next stop, which is eighteen blocks away, the streets quiet, almost deserted at this time of night. The moon in a crescent phase misted over, offering a suspicion of light as if coming from behind a closed door.

I must have walked fifteen blocks in all when I glance behind me for the first time and see, or imagine I see, some incalculable distance away, a shadow figure running toward me, holding up something, some offering, a coat perhaps or some kind of oddly shaped weapon. Deciphering my perception costs me no more than a moment or two. And then of course I pick up my stride, continue on my way, my urgency unabated, but like in a dream I suddenly feel the poison flash through my veins, the microscopic doses retarding my progress in imperceptible ways and I sense that before long, before I reach the entrance to the next station of the subway — this is a recurrent unfinished scenario — I will be caught by whomever it is coming up behind me (it is always you) prepared to accept whatever comes next.

Iremember a time (in a dream perhaps) when we ran toward each other on a crowded city street and came together — we were mocking the conventions of a certain kind of romantic film — in a rather cautious, disappointing hug. You insist it never happened, though the memory remains remarkably vivid.

“If I met you again after years of not seeing you, it would be the same between us as it is now,” you say. “People don’t change. Even as I get older to others, to myself I always remain the same.”

It is possible that I’m putting words in your mouth.

You had asked me to meet you at the Brass Bar, a place we used to hang out at when we both drank to tell me something you couldn’t or wouldn’t relay over the phone.

The mystery of your news has piqued my curiosity to the point that I’ve already imagined three possible alternate scenarios.

In scenario one you tell me that you’ve decided to move in with our mutual friend, Roger, and you wanted me to hear it from you first. It is a trial arrangement, you say, hardly permanent, but you both hope (and why wouldn’t you?) that it will be a successful trial. And that you’d like to have my blessings to accompany you on this precipitous and somewhat frightening step.

In scenario two you tell me that you have just learned that you are, as all the signs indicated, pregnant and you would appreciate it greatly if I would accompany you to an abortion clinic as moral support. I do not ask whose child it might be and you do not volunteer the information. I do not have to be a mathematician to know that it is not mine.

In scenario three, you tell me that you woke up this morning with the inescapable sense that it was possible that you were in love with me and had been avoiding my company for the past several months as a form of denial. You were eager, anxious even, to get my response to your news in person so you would have a better sense of how to proceed.

“I don’t know what to say,” I say.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Do you want the polite answer or the one I’ll regret afterward?”

“I can understand,” you say, “how this might be difficult for you to accept. It’s not my intention to hurt you. It’s never been my intention to hurt you. I just want us, the three of us, if at all possible, to remain friends.”

“I asked you because I didn’t know who else to ask. I think you understand what I’m saying.”

“I can understand your distrust. I distrust myself as much as you distrust me. Still, I hope I’m being sincere.”

I reject the first several invitations to come to dinner before yielding to your relentless campaign to keep me in the picture. Even so, I arrive forty minutes late, which I know without being told is a form of hostility. To cover my tracks, I bring over an expensive bottle of wine, a young Medoc not quite ready to drink.

After you go into the operating room — we have nothing or too much to say to each other on the way over, which is the same thing — the receptionist asks me if “your wife” had anything to eat in the past three hours or so. Since I’ve only been with you for the past thirty-five minutes, it is not a question I am equipped to answer. “What would happen if she had eaten within three hours?” I ask. “You never know,” the receptionist says. “It could be dangerous.” “Won’t the doctor ask her?” “That’s my job,” she says. “I’m supposed to check that out before I let them in to see the doctor. In your wife’s case I don’t know what I was thinking, but I let her get by without asking the question.”

As it turns out, I’m not the only one invited to dinner. There is another couple, who I meet at the door going in, and a single woman, Roger’s much younger half-sister, who (I believe, unless I have that wrong) has just come over from England and is staying with the two of you until she can find a place of her own. I hand Roger the bottle of wine I’ve brought, for which he thanks me effusively while glancing disparagingly at the label. “I know next to nothing about continental wines,” he says.

You make a show of being disappointed (perhaps that’s unfair on my part) at my muted reaction to your news, and after that to your superfluous avowal of sincerity. I’m not sure what you expected. Was I supposed to leap in the air with unbridled delight. “What brought about this discovery?” I ask.

On my left at table is the unattached woman, Elizabeth, and on my right is the female half of the other couple whose name — something starting with an F — I never quite get. Elizabeth tends to silence except to answer questions, and even then offers no more than a few words, words painstakingly chosen to avoid so much as a hint of intimate revelation. On the other hand, F has a lot to say, much of it the most banal form of chatter.

“You can’t go in there,” the receptionist says, but I do. It is like the primal dream of walking into your parents’ bedroom and discovering them in the sexual act.

You have made an uncharacteristically elaborate meal and we are into the third or fourth course, which consists of a pork chop nesting in an apple-cranberry puree, when Elizabeth makes her first unsolicited remarks. “You don’t like my brother much, do you?” she says.

My off-limits presence causes a collective hypersonic groan, the dust forming skeletal exclamation points on the white walls. You are the only one to speak words. “Get out of here,” you say. “When did you eat last?” I ask. “Please leave,” you say. “Can’t you see you’re not wanted here.” “It’s dangerous unless more than three hours have elapsed,” I say. “Please,” you say. “We’ll talk about this later.”

I had no sense of Elizabeth’s presence — I couldn’t even have described her if somebody had blindfolded me on the spot — until she makes the accusation concerning her brother in this small childlike voice, every word enunciated with equal stress. That’s when I turn to take her in, confronted by the fierce intelligence in her face. I had been planning to deny her assertion, but I can see immediately the pointlessness of lying to her. “It has nothing to do with your brother,” I say.