Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

It’s the interludes — the moments of frustrating delay — that tend to ruin things. I am sitting on the edge of your bed in my boxers, catching flashes of my protruding gut in the wall mirror, waiting for you to emerge from the bathroom. I make a point of not looking at my watch, but I sense at least ten minutes have passed since you announced your imminent return. My hard-on nods and stretches in your attenuated absence, establishes a mourner’s posture. Your large, feral cat, Isabella, pokes her way in and sniffs the air, checking me out from a protective distance. I hold out a hand in her direction, whisper her name. As an afterthought, having ignored me throughout, she jumps on the bed. That’s the moment you choose to re-enter the room, wearing a lime-green silk bathrobe that I may have given to you on some forgotten occasion, much of your left breast making an uncredited cameo. “What’s going on?” you say as Isabella bumps up against my shoulder. “I can’t leave the room for a moment, can I?”

My interest in you, which embarrasses me all things considered, has in recent years been swathed in denial. “I’ll lie alongside you,” I say as if I were the one doing you the favor, which may also be true. My offer, though implicitly accepted, is not received with notable enthusiasm. You are tired of course, and wounded, have lost to perceived necessity, to sacrificial slaughter, your unborn living other self. There is no comfort I can offer to answer that loss particularly when only a few hours ago you welcomed it. And while lying next to you in your rueful, wounded state — what could be more obscene? — my penis stands warily on guard. Your hand notices. “My poor baby,” you say.

“I’ll have a glass and then I’ll go,” you say, your back against the closed door, still in your coat. “It’ll be awkward, don’t you think, if Elizabeth walks in on us.” I edge toward you in a kind of willed slow motion, daring you to move out of my way. We crash softly against the door. “She no longer has a key,” I whisper before almost kissing your ear as you avert your head.

I am wary of seeming too eager so I instruct myself in the art of indifference, wait with checkered patience for you to make the first move. It’s not happening. We lie on our sides, facing each other from a modest distance. Finally, you seem to slip almost imperceptibly in my direction as if my greater weight had tilted the bed and, encouraged, I enjoin the space between us. A chaste kiss followed by a second peck, followed by its open-mouthed, tongue-stabbing sister and then I undo your robe in a kind of antiintuitive dream act, parting the front before opening the belt. A nervous laugh escapes from your side of the bed, a childish giggle, a mousy squeak. A cry.

“I don’t know if I want to do this at this time,” you say, pulling me toward you with one arm, while holding me away with the other hand. “If you don’t know, who does?” I say.

“Does that make you happy?” you ask from some beneficent distance.

It follows, doesn’t it, it tends to follow, that when you get what you want, what you think you’ve always wanted — I’m speaking of myself here in the generic “you”—it isn’t anything like you thought it would be. Why isn’t it?

“I’d be happier if you didn’t ask that question,” I mumble in the denouement itself or just before I explode in your hand.

“Can you promise me that Elizabeth won’t return?” you say. “I’m willing to promise anything if it will get me what I want,” I say.

Then again there is the counter-productive pressure to perform brilliantly when I am with you so I am tempted to accept the ambiguous opportunity you offer me to gracefully withdraw. To back out while making it seem as if you are the one making the decision. Then it hits me, which changes everything, that you are the one making the decision.

“I want to be out front with you,” you say. “I loved being with you, but I don’t think we ought to do this again.”

“As long as I have your word for it,” you say. Every creak in the floorboards turns your head as if the only scenario that occupies you in the act of love is Elizabeth’s return to claim her place.

“Doesn’t it matter that I love you?”

Even as I take whatever risk you allow me, I feel myself backing off. “Do you love me?” you murmur or perhaps it is something else.

As we tangle, as I slide into you, This is what I want playing in my skull like a rediscovered tune, there is a knock at the door that repeats itself.

“Yes,” I say under my breath, “yes.”

I don’t know what to say.

It’s a presumption, she thought, for someone you’re no longer with and no longer love to write a book addressed to you. It’s equally presumptuous perhaps to assume that an unnamed character with whom you share, if only metaphorically, certain behaviors is intended as you.

Still, who else can You be if not her? More than 50 percent of the character’s attributes are hers or close enough. JB gets off on getting intimates seriously pissed off at him and she’s hardly the rule-affirming exception. That’s all she will say at the moment without her analyst in the room or at least an impartial third party, which excludes most of the people who’ve passed through the revolving doors of their story.

First things first: her name is V. Lois Lane. The V stands for Virginia and is only used on her driver’s license. She is a former Lifestyle Editor of The Daily Metropolis and is currently Articles Editor for the hippest monthly on the newstands, The Magazine .

There will be none of the evasions of anonymity in her text, though she is a shy person, who tries to disguise her shyness by saying whatever comes into her head no matter how outrageous or indiscreet. She doesn’t censor her conversation, that’s not her style, because if she did, she sorely doubts she’d ever get anything said.

What the text provisionally called YOU never mentions is that Jay and I actually lived together for an extended disputed, depending on your source, period of time. The meeting in an elevator repeatedly, circumstantially, as a means of bringing us together is pure fantasy — or literary conceit if you will. Jay and I met through an ad in, of all places, The New York Review of Books . After I broke up with Roger, my childhood sweetheart and first husband — yes, his name was actually Roger — my sister, presumably concerned about my state of mind, took out a Personals ad on my behalf in The New York Review . The idea was to interview the various respondents until she found someone she deemed suitable for me and then bring us together in a way that would seem uncontrived. Delores was in a relationship herself at the time so there was bound to be some awkwardness inherent in the procedure.

Jay, who claims never to have answered a Personals ad before, was the fourth or fifth respondent and the first to pass Lorrie’s test. Why it required six separate dates for Lorrie to settle on him as “perfect” for me remains one of those mysteries better left unexplored.

In any event, for their seventh date, Lorrie invited Jay to dinner to meet me, not mentioning to either of us at the outset the disguised intention of the invitation. In fact, we were both somewhat annoyed at the other’s unexpected presence until Lorrie, during the dessert course, offered us a slightly fictionalized version of what she had been about. “This is my sister,” she said as if that were title enough for anyone. “This is Jay sometimes called JB.”

I have a confession to make before I go any further. I was the one, the well-meaning officious one who took the ad out for my sister, who had been going through a man-hating phase. Therefore the reason for the six dates was not quite the mystery I made it out to be earlier, though I was never really sure of my motives. Why hadn’t I turned Jay over to Lorrie earlier? I can only give you my reasons at the time, which were these. There was something about him that I found elusive, even remote. Who was JB really beyond the pose of his self-presentation? With each date, I said to myself the next date will decide my course of action one way or another. And maybe — I’m not quite ready to admit this — I didn’t want to relinquish him.