Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

Elizabeth returns her attention to her food. I notice that you are watching us with this troubled look on your face. “There’s a little piece of heaven on my plate,” F announces to no one in particular.

It’s not that I think you’re being insincere — well it is and it isn’t — or not that so much as that your so-called revelation could easily be rescinded tomorrow or the day after that or even in the next hour by an opposing self-discovery. “Of course I’m pleased to hear it,” I say in this grim voice that causes you to laugh. “When I look at you now,” you say, “I begin to wonder who I thought I was thinking of when I told myself I loved you.”

“It’s all right,” Elizabeth whispers, “I don’t much like him either.” When I laugh nervously at Elizabeth’s remark, I catch you glaring at me. F says, turning away from Roger with whom she’d been discussing some movie neither of them had seen, “I’m just wild for the taste of dill. If it were up to me, it would be included in every dish. Do you know what I mean?” I nod, or don’t, trying to remember (did I ever know?) what signifies the taste of dill. “Then why are you staying in their house?” I ask Elizabeth.

The doctor holds his scalpel, or whatever instrument it is, poised in the air as if it were a conductor’s baton, as I back out the door. “Sorry, I interrupted,” I say. “I was worried.” “Everything’s under control,” the nurse says, holding a hypodermic needle behind her back.

A waitress comes by and we each order the house pale ale. “This was not an easy confession to make,” you say between sips. “And I have to say you’ve not made it any easier. What do you want to do?” “What do you want to do?” I ask. “Where do you want to take this?” “Since you ask, sweetheart, there’s a movie starting at 7:40 at the Angelica that I’d like to catch.”

A half hour later you emerge from the operating room, huddled over, the nurse a half-step behind you. “Would you like a wheelchair?” she asks you. You shake your head in this weary way, but then the nurse asks the question again. I get up from my molded plastic chair and meet you halfway, offering you a hand which you refuse.

Roger holds up his wineglass and takes a sip before offering a toast: “To a joyous occasion made all the more joyous by having good friends around to share it with.” Oddly, no one else raises a glass except the man who is with F and whose name is either Heinz or Hans or something else altogether different. You pour yourself a glass of seltzer and, after looking around the table at the non-participating guests, join the toast. Eventually F follows suit, leaving only Roger’s sister and the narrator of our story with our glasses conspicuously not uplifted. “Well, you two,” Roger says. “To the chef,” I say, lifting my glass. “To the chef,” Roger echoes and we sip from our glasses with relative synchronicity. “Traitor,” Elizabeth whispers or perhaps I imagine it, not bothering to look in her direction until the toast is put to rest.

I come around to your side of the car to help you out. “Don’t bother,” you say, but you teeter when you walk so I accompany you in the elevator to your apartment, which is on the ninth floor. You unlock the door and I help you in, my arm around your waist, and you say, “Thank you, but I really don’t need your help; I really don’t.” I stand around awkwardly, watching you bounce off the door as you lurch into the bedroom. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” I ask and get no answer. I pace the living room, consider going home, but end up sitting down in your not-quite-comfortable easy chair.

After the meat course, there is a second salad course — a puff of unidentifiable greens (perhaps arugula) circled by tangerine slices — and Roger makes a joke about no one being able to get up from the table after the dinner is finished to which you take exception. “I just wanted to do something elegant,” you say, “something in the grand manner. This is the menu, or as close to it as I could get with local provisions, that a wife of one of the Russian tsars made for her husband before she had him killed. I’m sorry if it doesn’t meet with your approval.”

“Nothing would make me happier,” you say, “than to see you genuinely happy, but that’s always been out of my hands. You’ve heard what I have to say so what do you have to say?” I suggest a walk, which invites a skeptical look, and signal to the wrong waitress for our bill, which comes in any event from another direction.

I wake, slumped back in a chair in your living room, unaware of how I got there, when I’m suddenly aware of you crossing the room in slow motion, your backless slippers slapping the floor. “I’m still bleeding,” I hear you say. “Shouldn’t the bleeding have stopped by now?” “What did the doctor say?” I hear myself answer. “Would I have asked you if I knew?” you say, disappearing from the room.

There is a police action outside the restaurant, five uniformed cops surrounding a homeless Asian man of about sixty, who is waving his arms and talking to himself. One of the cops has his gun drawn. A small crowd looks on as if they were deer caught in some universal headlight. I try to move you in an opposite direction, but you refuse to relinquish your vigil. “Shouldn’t we do something?” you say.

Roger sulks as the dessert course circulates and you pretend not to notice. “Do you give doggy bags,” F asks, “for those who can’t finish this wonderful meal?” Hans, on the other hand, finishes his lemon mousse bomb in short order and reaches across the table to annex F’s. “It’s scrumptious,” F says, yielding her dish — the dessert itself untouched — with apparent relief. Elizabeth offers me hers, but in fact I’ve only been able to get down a third of mine. Roger, after only a few bites, rushes off to the bathroom, his hand on his stomach. You survey the table, shaking your head in my direction, with an amused smile on your face. “I have to say,” you say, “that Hans is the only one that gets an ‘A’.”

You approach the policeman next to the one who has his gun drawn and ask what danger the man they’ve surrounded represents. I can’t hear the rest of the conversation, but there are several exchanges back and forth before you return to my side. “What happened?” I ask. At first you don’t answer, but instead take my arm and urge me away down the street in the direction I originally offered. I have to ask again to get my answer and still you hesitate as if we were dealing here with classified information. “He threatened to arrest me for obstructing justice,” you say, looking over your shoulder. I am tempted to laugh but I can see that you are in no mood to be amused by absurdity.

You ask me to help you lift something when the others go into the living room with their espresso cups, but that is only a ruse so that you can ask me something else. “If you think I’m making a big mistake, I wish you’d tell me,” you say. “I think you’re making a big mistake,” I say. “You don’t really,” you say, “do you? Or is that the voice of jealousy talking?” That’s when Roger enters the kitchen and sees us with our heads together and I can tell from his scowl that he has put the worst possible interpretation on our being together. “How are you feeling, darling?” you say to him. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

There seem to be police cars everywhere, the next street blocked off, and we walk determinedly in silence as if no dialogue is possible between us until we’re outside the law’s ubiquitous presence. “It’s an illusion, isn’t it?” you say. “It’s the plot of a bad movie when a man and a woman who have been friends the way we have suddenly decide they love each other. Of course they love each other. That’s what friendship’s about, isn’t it? Friends love one another.” We are standing on a corner having this talk when a police car drives by and the cop not driving waves to us to move on.