Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

“You used a milk product in the dessert without telling me” Roger says in a voice that alternates between fret and accusation. “You know I’m lactose intolerant.” “I guess I knew that but it slipped my mind,” you say. “Forgive me?” “How can I not?” he says. I am standing behind them in an awkward spot and I have to work my way between them to get by. “You’re such a sweet man,” she says. They have their arms around each other as I clatter out of the room, temporarily invisible by general consent.

“You don’t have to stay,” you say returning to the bedroom after an extended imprisonment in the bathroom with the door conspicuously latched from inside. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’ve done because I do. Appreciate it. Thank you.” I put on my jacket as if it were a slow motion replay, telling myself that if I walk out as advised, you will hold it against me in the balance. “I’m going,” I say to the closed door of the bedroom and wait in vain the length of three heartbeats for a response before returning to the uncomfortable overstuffed chair to consider my next move.

We all seem to have eaten too much, sit in your living room in various stages of open-mouthed stupor, cups and saucers jangling on our knees, all except Elizabeth who is not in the picture. Every five minutes or so Hans announces that it is time to go, but he seems embedded in the couch. F has her eyes shut, waking herself periodically with noisy belches, distantly troubled by the rage of her digestive system. I have just talked myself into standing up when Elizabeth, appearing as it seems from nowhere, comes toward me. “I need a favor from you,” she says. “Would you mind dropping me off at a hotel? I know you have a car with you or at least that’s what I’ve been told.” Roger interrupts, stepping into our as yet one-sided conversation before I can respond. “Don’t be silly, Liz,” he says. “You have a room here for as long as you need it.” “You’ve both been much too kind,” she says. “Really. I’d appreciate it if you backed off just a bit.” “I’ll give you a lift to wherever you want to go,” I say. “Don’t interfere in what doesn’t concern you,” Roger says. I don’t recall throwing a punch at that moment but more than one person that witnesses the event corroborates that perception so I will only say in my defense that it was an unexamined impulse run amok.

The same police car that waved us on trails us, dogging our tracks, for a couple of blocks, though it’s possible, I admit grudgingly, that its persistent presence is circumstantial. Another couple, slightly younger, hurries past us. “They’re arresting people,” the woman says. “Get off the street if you can.” We run in their wake for a half a block, holding hands as we go. “This is the worst possible tactic,” you say to me. “Slow down. Pretend you’re talking to me. The last thing you want to show these people is that you’re afraid of them.”

“I don’t have money to burn,” Elizabeth says to me as I start the car and head downtown. “Do you know of a cheapish place that’s not bug-ridden or anything?” I ask her how much she wants to spend, a question I never quite get an answer to. “No more than I have to,” she says or words to that effect. The first two hotels I stop at are “too pricey,” the third is “a bit skanky.” The fourth has another not so easily definable problem. After the inspection of each unacceptable hotel, she apologizes for taking up so much of my time, the apologies accumulating. My tiredness, I assume, includes hers as well and in fact she yawns a few times between the fifth and sixth hotel possibility. It is only then, I want you to know, that I invite her to spend the night in the unused second bedroom in my apartment. “Oh,” she says as if someone had put his hand on her ass in a public place. I realize after a moment or so of silence and the brief unexpected touch of her lips on my cheek that she has accepted my offer.

The phone is ringing inside as I struggle to unlock the door to my apartment. That it is inappropriately late for a call makes the receiving of it all the more urgent. “I’m frightened,” the unrecognizable female voice on the other end whispers huskily after a moment of understated breathing. A wrong number, no doubt, and I am about to say so when the caller addresses me by name. “I know you understand what I’m going through,” you say. “Would you mind returning? I need someone around I can trust.”

At the corner, a police van appears and cuts off the couple that had run past us. We watch as they are handcuffed and loaded into the back of the van, which seems from my vantage to have a crowd of other arrestees already inside. We step inside an antique clothing store and you ask the proprietor if she knows what’s going on outside. “I try to mind my own business,” she says. “Do you mind if we hang out in here for a while?” I ask. The proprietor, who is a youngish woman with white hair, considers my question. “If you want to stay,” she says, not looking at us, speaking very slowly, “you’ll have to purchase something.” While you go through the shelves and racks and barrels — I have offered to buy as a gift whatever you pick out — I check out the street activity. It is hard to see anything without making whoever cares to look from the streetside aware of me. I’m not positive of this but someone — a man in uniform perhaps — seems to be coming in our direction.

I have this idea as I unlatch the door to my undersized apartment that my guest room will seem as inadequate to Elizabeth as the various hotels she’s rejected. I offer her a drink of something, which she politely refuses, as a delaying technique. “It’s charming,” she says, traversing the hallway to my small living room, taking possession of my favorite chair. “I may not be putting this right, but it seems to me wonderfully impersonal.”

When I return to your apartment you are waiting at the door for my arrival or so I think because the door opens virtually the moment I punch the buzzer. We sit together on your couch for a while, your head on my shoulder. “My friend, I feel so much better now that you’re here,” you say. Momentarily, you fall asleep and we sit this way awhile, you sleeping awkwardly on my shoulder, your head increasing in weight by the minute. Finally, careful not to wake you, I lift you up and carry you like a child into the bedroom. It is only after I put you under the covers in the dark, wondering if it would be all right to lie beside you, that I notice a shadowy form in the arm chair on the right side of the room.

Elizabeth does not leave the next day or even the day after, is still in fact spending her nights in my guest room two weeks after her arrival the night of your dinner party. She has been looking for an apartment, she says, and has not been able to find something up to her standards at a price she thinks she can afford. You and Roger have gotten it into your heads, seem to take it for granted, that we’re having some kind of torrid affair, which I’ve given up denying. I’m not sure myself what’s going on between us, but it’s not much. Roger calls here two or three times a week to speak to his sister and it is through his perception that I get your reaction to Elizabeth staying with me. You are furious with me, Roger says, and it is creating stresses in their relationship. “Elizabeth’s no trouble,” I say to him. “I should think not,” he says, meaning of course whatever it is he means.

The cop looks in the window, but doesn’t come in the store and why should he? We hang out in the shop another fifteen minutes, each buying something of negligible use — I get a pair of hand-knitted gloves, gray with an orange leather patch at the palm — before returning to the street. By this time, we’ve learned that there’s been an unauthorized anti-war protest march in the vicinity, which explains the police activity and the random arrests. My idea is to move off in a direction that will separate us from the protesters, while you think we ought to show solidarity, even get ourselves arrested if that’s the way it plays out, since we’re in the neighborhood of the march anyway. And so we stand in front of the store, debating the relative merits of our positions in hushed voices. We end up, veering off in opposite directions, but after a couple of blocks, I decide — not wanting to seem a coward in your eyes — to turn around and go after you.