Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

That night, latish, after my uneventful visit to Bill Worth’s Village apartment, Jay called, wanting to know if my virtue was still intact. He asked in fact if I was all right, but what else might that mean? “Why this concern?” I asked.

“I feel protective toward you,” he said.

How would I have felt if Bill Worth hadn’t asked? I wondered. Would I have lied to Jay had I accepted Bill Worth’s offer? Questions concerning roads not taken tend to occupy me long after those roads are no longer on my map.

Jay was ten minutes late for our luncheon date at the Terror, a recently opened Middle Eastern restaurant with a provocative menu three blocks from work. Fortunately, I had a manuscript with me to edit, and I was marking it up with outraged queries to pass the time. When a man arrived, conspicuously out of breath from apparent running, I barely noticed his sliding into the seat opposite me, or at least I gave a good imitation of not noticing. We each waited for the other to introduce the not easily definable subject that occasioned this meeting.

“I’ve missed our lunches together,” he eventually said, an intrusion on our discussion of some movie we had separately seen.

“I don’t know if I missed you or not,” I said.

“If you don’t know then you probably haven’t,” he said as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

I couldn’t help contrasting Jay’s reaction to Bill Worth’s. Bill Worth didn’t really care a lot whether I accepted his proposition or not. You couldn’t reject him in that situation because there wasn’t enough of him at risk. On the other hand, Jay’s apparent cool was obviously worked-up. Though I might respect a man who showed his vulnerability, I was never particularly attracted to whatever it was disguised as indifference.

I had the sense, like a buzz at the back of the neck, that I would say something to Jay — that it would flame from my mouth without premeditation — something so unforgivable that he would get up and leave the table and never talk to me again.

“What if,” I said, “what if I told you I had slept with Bill Worth? Would we be here now drinking watery coffee?”

“Did you?” He took his glasses off to unleash his X-ray vision.

“Have you been sleeping with my sister?”

“What does your sister tell you?”

“We don’t discuss you in that way. I suppose I don’t want to know the answer or I know it already and don’t want to think about it.”

“So you slept with Bill Worth to get back at me for being with your sister, which, let me remind you, was your project in the first place.”

“But I said I didn’t sleep with Bill Worth.”

He held out his hand and I grabbed on to it before it got away, a gesture in complete opposition to what I was feeling about him at the moment.

“Where does this leave us?” he said.

“Well,” I said,” I’m not going to go to bed with you if that’s what you think.” In taking back my hand, I jarred my coffee cup with my elbow, about half of the cup overflowing its bounds sopping paper napkins in its wake.

“Why don’t you just throw the coffee in my face?” he said, getting up, dropping some money on the table and walking out in a way that begged for a recall.

“Bill Worth’s is bigger than yours,” I called after him, turning at least one waitress’s head.

That night, unable to sleep, I called my sister’s number and hung up when Jay answered. My memory is short. But I couldn’t remember having behaved so badly before. There were two consolations. One, that Jay was to blame, and two, that I secretly knew that I was a better person than the one on display.

A week later, Lorrie called and caught me in a less dangerous mood. It took twenty minutes of idle chatter before she found her way to the point of her call. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said. “Jay and I have decided it wasn’t meant to be.”

I felt immediately sympathetic and inexplicably anxious. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I appreciate your saying that,” she said. “I felt bad because you gave him to me as a kind of gift and I think it’s just terrible to throw a gift back in the giver’s face, but I think he preferred your imitation of me to the real thing. We were never really on the same wavelength.”

“I don’t think I ever understood what that expression means,” I said.

When Lorrie took pains to explain the expression to me, I knew she wasn’t suffering Jay’s loss to any terrible extent. “Would you mind a lot if I dated Jay?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I might. Could you at least wait a couple of months?”

I thought I could, but when it came down to it I couldn’t. My plan was to let a month pass and then take it from there, call him or e-mail him, depending on how I felt at the time. It seemed to me a reasonable plan and I probably would have held to it if I hadn’t impatiently phoned him three days after Lorrie reported their split. It was not a random headstrong act, my call. I woke up during the night, taken in hand by a dream in which Jay came to the door to sell me the O-Z volume of an anatomical encyclopedia, which I refused to buy unless the A-N was also included. I asked myself: Why would Jay have broken up with Lorrie so soon after our edgy lunch unless he was sending me a message? The message, as I read it, was, “I’m available to you.” It seemed only good manners to respond.

I had to call three times before I circumvented his answering machine and even when I got him live so to speak, my first impulse was to return the phone gently to its cradle. In answer to his bored “Hello,” I said in a somewhat accusing voice, “Why have you broken with my sister?” And then, listening to myself in echo, I laughed crazily.

“Are you asking for yourself,” he said, “or as a spokesperson for the local chapter of the dating police?”

“I won’t do anything that will hurt my sister,” I said. “If we’re going to see each other — is that what you want? I hope so because it’s what I want — we’re going to have to be circumspect for a while. I hate lying, I do, but I don’t want to hurt Lorrie. Do you want to come by tonight? There’s a Moroccan takeout down the street that three different people have recommended to me.”

He didn’t answer right away, which I never quite forgave him for. “Am I really smaller than Bill Worth?” he said.

“Oh come on,” I said. “I never saw Bill Worth’s. I was just …”

For three weeks or so, we got away with it or at least no one — certainly not Lorrie — let me know she knew what was going on. Many of our mutual acquaintances assumed she and Jay were still an item and it wasn’t my business, was it, to tell anyone it wasn’t so. My semi-regular conversations with Lorrie probably showed some strain, though Lorrie for her own reasons refused to notice. It was our habit to touch base virtually every other day and eventually Jay’s name popped up, Lorrie going back and forth in her feelings about him, mostly glad it was over, wishing he would call some time, aggrieved that he hadn’t cared enough to try to patch things up. When she talked against him, even mildly, which was Lorrie’s style, it was all I could do not to argue in his defense.

Deceiving your own sister is no fun or too much guilty pleasure for any decent person to acknowledge her exhilaration.

I didn’t believe I was doing anything wrong, but I longed to confess, wrote Lorrie an apologetic letter which I very nearly posted.

In the end it was Roger who blew the whistle, mentioning it to Lorrie as a by the way, assuming (so he said) that she already knew.

“I don’t think I’ll ever talk to you again,” Lorrie said to me on the blower and then stayed on another fifteen minutes to chat.